Pata wey 


phony, 


ie 
i! Pett 


Bic 
aise 


eNecate 
a 


e 
moe alate 
Ae ee eakt 
PRG wntrec etsy 
Loe. 
* 


em 

4 
aS 
a 


rye 


Teta, 
Fe oe hee 


. 
oe 











Division (1) 
BL 48 .W44 1926 


Whitehead, Alfred North, | 
1861- 1947. 


Religion in the making 











RELIGION IN THE MAKING 
LOWELL LECTURES, 1926 





THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO : DALLAS 
ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., LimiTED 
LONDON + BOMBAY - CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lto, 
TORONTO 


RELIGION 
IN THE MAKING 


“LOWELL Lectures, 1926 


By 
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD 
F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester), 


Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews), Hon. D. Sc. (Univ. 
of Wisconsin), Hon. Sc. D. (Harvard) 


Fellow of Trinity College in the University of Cambridge 
and Professor of Philosophy in Harvard University 


New Work 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1926 
All rights reserved 


Copyright, 1926, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and electrotyped. 
Published September, 1926. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORE. 


To 
E. W. 





Preface 


This book consists of four lectures on religion de- 
livered in King’s Chapel, Boston, during February, 1926. 
The train of thought which was applied to science in 
my Lowell Lectures of the previous year, since pub- 
lished under the title, Science and the Modern World, 
is here applied to religion. The two books are inde- 
pendent, but it is inevitable that to some extent they 
elucidate each other by showing the same way of 
thought in different applications. 

The aim of the lectures was to give a concise analysis 
of the various factors in human nature which go to 
form a religion, to exhibit the inevitable transformation 
of religion with the transformation of knowledge, and 
more especially to direct attention to the foundation of 
religion on our apprehension of those permanent ele- 
ments by reason of which there is a stable order in the 
world, permanent elements apart from which there 
could be no changing world. 

A. N. W. 


Harvarp UNIVERSITY 
March 13, 1926 





Contents 


PRACT leer cee Me aah Leet MUI Gre a ME ae RPE 


CHAPTER 

PURLIGION IN LLISTORY Aue. n tammy evi shui ho 
Ter Regan Deh mer omme ee el Hera tea Moai g LO 
Tis bne Eemerpence ot eligion ies 0 ks 
Ti, Ritvaland Mmotiony. ee ve a 20 
TV DCHOR Ny Aas Smee Snel Nan hea 
NeW tea Pisce Nie belts Qe Pw i RO eh a, TREY aOR ANAS 
Wie CLE ASCEND OTAVIAtlin Caters NOK A COG 
Wiper LAER Da COON ELAS Mn me My bovekd ve Line 
11. RELIGION AND DocMA. . . 47 
1. The Religious Pamecaienesed in rates 47 

i. The Description of Religious Experi- 
revatil= Bye VP Me SRE Vow Cova pot UPR Me AL et be. 
UA a es PER EATON Nt Hiuaed ALY 14 
Iv. The Quest of God SN PINRO, Mig ete Ded Lec 
I. Bopy AND SPIRIT . . SR Pani be SOR het 
1. Religion and WMecipnysice Ce So 83 

11. The Contribution of Religion to Meta- 
PUYSICS AP ss SAL MENTS CoO 
m1. A Metaphysical Teecanies Ahearn AE Dat 


Iv. Godandthe MoralOrder . . . . 94 

v. Valueandthe PurposeofGod . . 100 
PESOS ACE VIIa ret Crue is amt ert eat TOD 
Wit NUE CreativeProcese vin ct LEE 


CONTENTS 


1v. TRUTH AND CRITICISM . ait) 
1. The Development of Dogma 
11, Experience and Expression 
wi. The Three Traditions . 
Iv. The Nature of God . 
v. Conclusion 


123 
123 
131 
139 
149 
158 


I 
RELIGION IN HISTORY 





RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


CHAPTER I- 
RELIGION IN HISTORY 
I. RELIGION DEFINED 


It is my purpose in the four lectures of 
this course to consider the type of justifi- |v 
cation which is available for belief in doctrines 
of religion. This is a question which in some 
new form challenges each generation. It is ,,/ 
the peculiarity of religion that humanity is 
always shifting its attitude towards it. 

The contrast between religion and the 
elementary truths of arithmetic makes my 
meaning clear. Ages ago the simple arithmeti- 
cal doctrines dawned on the human mind, and 
throughout history the unquestioned dogma 
that two and three make five reigned whenever 
it has been relevant. We all know what this 
doctrine means, and its history is of no im- 
portance for its elucidation. 


[13] 


‘ys 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


But we have the gravest doubt as to what 
religion means so far as doctrine is concerned. 
There is no agreement as to the definition of 
religion in its most general sense, including 
true and false religion; nor is there any agree- 
ment as to the valid religious beliefs, nor even 
as to what we mean by the truth of religion. It 
is for this reason that some consideration of 
religion as an unquestioned factor throughout 
the long stretch of human history is necessary 
to secure the relevance of any discussion of 
its general principles. 

There is yet another contrast. What is gen- 
erally disputed is doubtful, and what is doubtful 
is relatively unimportant—other things being 
equal. I am speaking of general truths. We 
avoid guiding our actions by general principles 
which are entirely unsettled. If we do not know 
what number is the product of 69 and 67, we 
defer any action pre-supposing the answer, till 
we have found out. This little arithmetical 
puzzle can be put aside till it is settled, and it is 
capable of definite settlement with adequate 
trouble. 


[14] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


But as between religion and arithmetic, 
other things are not equal. You use arithmetic, 
but you are religious. Arithmetic of course 
enters into your nature, so far as that nature 
involves a multiplicity of things. But it is 
there as a necessary condition, and not as a 
transforming agency. No one is invariably 
“justified” by his faith in the multiplication 
table. But in some sense or other, justifi- 
cation is the basis of all religion. « Your 
character is developed according to your faith. 
This is the primary religious truth from which 
no one can escape. Religion is force of belief 
cleansing the inward parts. For this reason the 
primary religious virtue is sincerity, a pene- 
trating sincerity. 

A religion, on its doctrinal side, can thus be 
defined as a system of general truths which 
have the effect of transforming character 
when they are sincerely held and vividly 
apprehended. 

In the long run your character and your 
conduct of life depend upon your intimate 
convictions. Life is-an internal fact for its 


[15] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


own sake, before it is an external fact relating 
itself to others. The conduct of external life 
is conditioned by environment, but it receives 
its final quality, on which its worth depends, 
from the internal life which is the self-realiza- 
tion of existence. Religion is the art and the 
'theory of the internal life of man, so far as it 
depends on the man himself and on what is 
permanent in the nature of things. 

This doctrine is the direct negation of the 
theory that religion is primarily a social fact. 
Social facts are of great importance to religion, 
because there is no such thing as absolutely 
independent existence. You cannot abstract 
society from man; most psychology is herd- 
psychology. But all collective emotions leave 
untouched the awful ultimate fact, which is 
the human being, consciously alone with 

fitself, for its own sake. 

J Religion is what the individual does with 
his own solitariness. It runs through three 
stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction. 
It is the transition from God the void to God 


[16] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY. 


the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the 
companion. ; | 

Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are | / 
never solitary, you are never religious. Col} 
lective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, 
churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, 
are the trappings of religion, its passing forms. 
They may be useful, or harmful; they may be 
authoritatively ordained, or merely temporary 
expedients. But the end of religion is beyond 
all this. 

Accordingly, what should emerge from re- 
ligion is individual worth of character. But 
worth is positive or negative, good or bad. 
Religion is by no means necessarily good. It 
may be very evil. The fact of evil, inter- 
woven with the texture of the world, shows 
that in the nature of things there remains 
effectiveness for degradation. In your religious 
experience the God with whom you have made 
terms may be the God of destruction, the God 
who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater 
reality. 


[17] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


In considering religion, we should not be 
obsessed by the idea of its necessary goodness. 
This is a dangerous delusion. The point to 
notice is its transcendent importance; and the 
fact of this importance is abundantly made 
evident by the appeal ,to history. 


II. THE EMERGENCE OF RELIGION 


Religion, so far as it receives external ex- 
pression in human history, exhibits four fac- 
tors or sides of itself. These factors are 
ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization. There 
is definite organized procedure, which is 
ritual: there are definite types of emotional 
expression: there are definitely expressed be- 
liefs: and there is the adjustment of these 
beliefs into a system, internally coherent and 
coherent with other beliefs. 

But all these four factors are not of equal 
influence throughout all historical epochs. The 
religious idea emerged gradually into human 
life, at first barely disengaged from other 
human interests. ‘The order of the emergence 


[18] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY. 


of these factors was in the inverse order of 
the depth of their religious importance: first 
ritual, then emotion, then belief, then ration- 
alization. 

The dawn of these religious stages is grad- 
ual. It consists in an increase of emphasis. 
Perhaps it is untrue to affirm that the later 
factors are ever wholly absent. But certainly, 
when we go far enough back, belief and 
rationalization are completely negligible, and 
emotion is merely a secondary result of 
ritual. Then emotion takes the lead, and the 
ritual is for the emotion which it generates. 
Belief then makes its appearance as explana- 
tory of the complex of ritual and emotion, and 
in this appearance of belief we may discern 
the germ of rationalization. 

It is not until belief and rationalization are 
well established that solitariness is discernible 
as constituting the heart of religious impor- 
tance. The great religious conceptions which 
haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind 
are scenes of solitariness: Prometheus chained 


[19] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, 
the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary 
Man on the Cross. It belongs to the depth 
of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, 
even by God. 


III. RITUAL AND EMOTION 


Ritual goes back beyond the dawn of his- 
tory. It can be discerned in the animals, 
in their individual habits and still more in 
their collective evolutions. Ritual may be 
defined as the habitual performance of definite 
actions which have no direct relevance to the 
preservation of the physical organisms of the 
actors. ‘ 

Flocks of birds perform their ritual evolu- 
tions in the sky. In Europe rooks and star- 
lings are notable examples of this fact. Ritual 
_is the primitive outcome of superfluous energy 
and leisure. It exemplifies the tendency of 
living bodies to repeat their own actions. 
Thus the actions necessary in hunting for 
food, or in other useful pursuits, are repeated 

[20] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


for their own sakes; and their repetition also 
repeats the joy of exercise and the emotion of 
success. 

In this way emotion waits upon ritual; and 
then ritual is repeated and elaborated for the 
sake of its attendant emotions. Mankind 
became artists in ritual. It was a tremendous 
discovery—how to excite emotions for their 
own sake, apart from some imperious biologi- 
cal necessity. But emotions sensitize the 
organism. ‘Thus the unintended effect was 
produced of sensitizing the human organism in 
a variety of ways diverse from what would 
have been produced by the necessary work of 
life. 

_ Mankind was started upon its adventures of 
curiosity and of feeling. 

It is evident that, according to this account, 
religion and play have the same origin in 
ritual. ‘This is because ritual is the stimulus 
to emotion, and an habitual ritual may diverge 
into religion or into play, according to the 
quality of the emotion excited. Even in 


[21] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


comparatively modern times, among the 
Greeks of the fifth century before Christ, the 
Olympic Games were tinged with religion, and 
the Dionysiac festival in Attica ended with a 
comic drama. Also in the modern world, a 
holy day and a holiday are kindred notions. 
Ritual is not the only way of artificially 
stimulating emotion. Drugs are equally effec- 
tive. Luckily the range of drugs at the com- 
mand of primitive races was limited. But 
there is ample evidence of the religious use of 
drugs in conjunction with the religious use of 
ritual. For example Athenzus tells us that 
among the Persians it was the religious duty 
of the King, once a year, at some stated 
festival in honour of Mithras, to appear in the 
temple intoxicated.t A relic of the religious 
awe at intoxication is the use of wine in the 
‘Communion service. It is an example of the 
upward trend of ritual by which a widespread 
association of thought is elevated into a great 


symbolism, divested of its primitive grossness. 


1Cf. The Deipnosophiste of Atheneus, Book X. I am indebted to my 
friend Professor J. H. Woods for this reference. 


[22] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


In this primitive phase of religion, domi- 
nated by ritual and emotion, we are dealing 
with essentially social phenomena. Ritual is 
more impressive, and emotion more active, 
when a whole society is concerned in the same 
ritual and the same emotion. Accordingly, a 
collective ritual and a collective emotion take 
their places as one of the binding forces of 
savage tribes. They represent the first faint 
glimmerings of the life of the spirit raised 
beyond concentration upon the task of supply- 
ing animal necessities. Conversely, religion 
in its decay sinks back into sociability. 


IV. BELIEF 


Mere ritual and emotion cannot maintain 
themselves untouched by intellectuality. Also 
the abstract idea of maintaining the ritual for 
the sake of the emotion, though it may express 
the truth about the subconscious psychology of 
primitive races, is far too abstract to enter 
into their conscious thoughts. A myth satis-| 
fies the demands of incipient rationality. Men : 

[23] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


found themselves practising various rituals, 
and found the rituals generating emotions. 
The myth explains the purpose both of the 
ritual and of the emotion. It is the product 
of the vivid fancy of primitive men in an un- 
fathomed world. 

To primitive man, and to ourselves on our 
primitive side, the universe is not so much un- 
fathomable as unfathomed—by this I mean 
undiscriminated, unanalyzed. It is not a 
complex of definite unexplained happenings, 
but a dim background shot across by isolated 
vivid effects charged with emotional excite- 
ments. The very presuppositions of a co- 
herent rationalism are absent. Such a ration- 
alism presupposes a complex of definite facts 
whose interconnections are sought. But the 
prior stage is a background of indefiniteness 
relieved by vivid acts of definition, inherently 
isolated. One exception must be made in 
favour of the routine of tribal necessities which 
are taken for granted. But what lies beyond 
the routine of life is in general void of definition; 
and when it is vivid, it is disconnected. 

[24] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


The myth which meets the ritual is some 
exceptional vivid fancy, or recollection of 
some actual vivid fact—probably distorted in 
remembrance—which appears not only as ex- 
planatory both of ritual and emotion, but also 
as generative of emotion when conjoined with 
the ritual. Thus the myth not only explains 
but reinforces the hidden purpose of the ritual, 
which is emotion. 

Then rituals and emotions and myths 
reciprocally interact; and the myths have 
various grades of relationship to actual fact, 
and have various grades of symbolic truth as 
being representative of large ideas only to be 
apprehended in some parable. Also in some 
cases the myth precedes the ritual. But there 
is the general fact that ritualism precedes 
mythology. For we can observe ritualism 
even among animals, and presumably they are 
destitute of a mythology. 

A myth will involve special attention to 
some persons or to some things, real or imagi- 
nary. Thus in a sense, the ritual, as per- 

[25] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


formed in conjunction with the explanatory 
purpose of the myth, is the primitive worship 
of the hero-person or the hero-thing. But 
there can be very little disinterested worship 
among primitive folk—even less than now, if 
possible. Accordingly, the belief in the myth 
will involve the belief that something is to be 
got out of him or it, or that something is to 
be averted in respect to the evil to be feared 
from him or it. Thus incantation, prayer, 
praise, and ritual absorption of the hero 
deity emerge. 

If the hero be a person, we call the ritual, 
with its myth, “religion”; if the hero be a 
thing, we call it “magic.” In religion we in- 
duce, in magic we compel. ‘The important 
difference between magic and religion is that 
magic is unprogressive and religion sometimes - 
is progressive; except in so far as science can be 
traced back to the progress of magic. 

Religion, in this stage of belief, marks a new 
formative agent in the ascent of man. For 
just as ritual encouraged emotion beyond the 

[26] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


mere response to practical necessities, so re- 
ligion in this further stage begets thoughts 
divorced from the mere battling with the 
pressure of circumstances. Imagination se- 
cured in it a machinery for its development; 
thought has been thereby led beyond the 
immediate objects in sight. Its concepts may 
in these early stages be crude and horrible; 
but they have the supreme virtue of being 
concepts of objects beyond immediate sense 
and perception. 

This is the stage of uncoordinated beliefs. 
So far as this is the dominant phase there - 
can be a curious tolerance, in that one cult 
‘does not war upon another cult. Since there 
lis a minimum of coordination, there is room 
for all. But religion is still a thoroughly 
social phenomenon. The cult includes the 
tribe, or at least it includes some well-defined 
body of persons within the social organism. 
You may not desert your own cults, but 
there need be no clash between cults. In the 
higher stages of such a religion there are 


[27] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


tribal gods, or many gods within a tribe, 
with the loosest coordination of cults and 
myths. 

Though religion can be a source of progress, 
it need not be so, especially when its dominant 
feature is this stage of uncriticized belief. It 
is easy for a tribe to stabilize its ritual and 
its myths, and there need be no external spur 
to progress. In fact, this is the stage of 
religious evolution in which the masses of 
semi-civilized humanity have halted—the stage 
of satisfactory ritual and of satisfied belief 
without impulse towards higher things. Such . 
religion satisfies the pragmatic test: It works, 
and thereby claims that it be awarded the 
prize for truth. 


V. RATIONALISM 


The age of martyrs dawns with the coming 
of rationalism. The antecedent phases of 
religion had been essentially sociable. Many 
were called, and all were chosen. The final 
phase introduces the note of solitariness: 
“Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,... 

[28] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


and few there be that find it.” When a 
modern religion forgets this saying, it is suffer- 
ing from an atavistic relapse into primitive 
barbarism. It is appealing to the psychology 
of the herd, away from the intuitions of the 
few. 

The religious epoch which we are now con- 
sidering is very modern. Its past duration is 
of the order of six thousand years. Of course 
exact dates do not count; you can extend the 
epoch further back into the past in order to 
include some faint anticipatory movement, or 
you can contract its duration so as to exclude 
flourishing survivals of the earlier phase. The 
movement has extended over all the civilized 
races of Asia and Europe. In the past Asia 
has proved the most fertile in ideas, but with- 
in the last two thousand years Europe has 
given the movement a new aspect. It is to be 
noted that the two most perfect examples of 
rationalistic religions have flourished chiefly 
in countries foreign to the races among which 
they had their origin. 

The Bible is by far the most complete ac- 

[29] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


count of the coming of rationalism into 
religion, based on the earliest documents 
available. Viewed as such an account, it is 
only relevant to the region between the Tigris 
and the Nile. It exhibits the note of pro- 
gressive solitariness in the religious idea: 
first, types of thought generally prevalent; 
then protesting prophets, isolated figures of 
denunciation and exhortation stirring the Jew- 
ish nation; then one man, with twelve dis- 
ciples, who met with almost complete national 
rejection; then the adaptation for popular 
survival of this latter doctrine by another man 
who, very significantly, had no first-hand 
contact with the original teaching. In his 
hands, something was added and something was 
lost; but fortunately the Gospels also survive. 

It is evident that I have drawn attention to 
the span of six thousand years because, in 
addition to being reasonable when we have 
regard to all the evidence, it corresponds to 
the chronology of the Bible. We—in Europe 
and America—are the heirs of the religious 

[30] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


movements depicted in that collection of 
books. Discussion on the methods of religion 
and their justification must, in order to be 
relevant, base itself upon the Bible for illustra- 
tion. We must remember, however, that Bud- 
dhism and Mahometanism, among others, must 
also be included in the scope of general state- 
ments, even if they are not explicitly referred to. 

Rational religion is religion whose beliefs 
and rituals have been reorganized with the 
aim of making it the central element in a co- 
herent ordering of life—an ordering which 
shall be coherent both in respect to the eluci- 
dation of thought, and in respect to the 
direction of conduct towards a unified purpose 
commanding ethical approval. 

The peculiar position of religion is that it 
stands between abstract metaphysics and the 
particular principles applying to only some 
among the experiences of life. The relevance 
of its concepts can only be distinctly discerned 
in moments of insight, and then, for many of 
us, only after suggestion from without. Hence 


[31] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


religion bases itself primarily upon a small 
selection from the common experiences of the 
race. On this side, religion ranges itself as 
one among other specialized interests of man- 
kind whose truths are of limited validity. But 
on its other side, religion claims that its con- 
cepts, though derived primarily from special 
experiences, are yet of universal validity, to be 
applied by faith to the ordering of all ex- 
perience. 

~ Rational religion appeals to the direct intu- 
ition of special occasions, and to the elucida- 
tory power of its concepts for all occasions. 
It arises from that which is special, but it 
extends to what is general. The doctrines of 
rational religion aim at being that metaphysics 
which can be derived from the supernormal 

experience of mankind in its moments of — 
finest insight. Theoretically, rational religion 
could have arisen in complete independence of 
the antecedent social religions of ritual and 
mythical belief. Before the historical sense 
had established itself, that was the way in 

[32] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


which the apologetic theologians tended to 
exhibit the origins of their respective religions. 
But the general history of religion, and in par- 
ticular that portion of its history contained in 
the Bible, decisively negatives that view. 
Rational religion emerged as a gradual trans- 
formation of the preéxisting religious forms. 
Finally, the old forms could no longer contain 
the new ideas, and the modern religions of 
civilization are traceable to definite crises in 
this process of development. But the develop- 
ment was not then ended; it had only acquired 
more suitable forms for self-expression. 

The emergence of rational religion was 
strictly conditioned by the general progress 
of the races in which it arose. It had to wait 
for the development in human consciousness 
of the relevant general ideas and of the rele- 
vant ethical intuitions. It required that such 
ideas should not merely be casually enter- 
tained by isolated individuals, but that they 
should be stabilized in recognizable forms of 
expression, so as to be recalled and communi- 

[33] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


cated. You can only speak of mercy among a 
people who, in some respects, are already 
merciful. 

A language is not a universal mode of 
expressing all ideas whatsoever. It is a limited 
mode of expressing such ideas as have been 
frequently entertained, and urgently needed, 
by the group of human beings who developed 
that mode of speech. It is only during a 
comparatively short period of human history 
that there has existed any language with an 
adequate stock of general terms. Such general 
terms require a permanent literature to define 
them by their mode of employment. 

The result is that the free handling of 
general ideas is a late acquirement. I am not 
maintaining that the brains of men were in- 
adequate for the task. ‘The point is that it 
took ages for them to develop first the appli- 
ances and then the habits which made general- 
ity of thought possible and prevalent. For 
ages, existing languages must have been ready 
for development. If men had been in contact 

[34] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


with a superior race, either personally or by a 
survival of their literature, a process which 
requires scores or even hundreds of generations 
might have been antedated, so as to have 
been effected almost at once. Such, in fact, 
was the later history of the development of 
the races of Northern Europe. Again, a social 
system which encourages developments of 
thought can procure the advent. This is the 
way in which the result was first obtained. 
Society and language grew together. 

The influence of the antecedent type of 
religion, ceremonial, mythical, and sociable, 
has been great; and the estimates as to its 
value diverse. During the thousand years 
preceding the Christian era, there was a pecul- 
iarly intense struggle on the part of rational- 
ism to transform the more primitive type. 
The issue was a new synthesis which, in the 
forms of the various great religions, has lasted 
to the present day. A rational generality was 
introduced into the religious ideas; and the 
myth, when retained, was reorganized with 

[35] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


the intention of making it an account of veri- 
fiable historical circumstances which exem- 
plified the general ideas with adequate 
perfection. 

Thus rational criticism was admitted in 
principle. The appeal was from the tribal 
custom to the direct individual intuition, 
ethical, metaphysical, or logical: ‘For I 
desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the 
knowledge of God more than burnt offerings,” 
are words which Hosea ascribes to Jehovah; 
and he thereby employs the principles of indi- 
vidual criticism of tribal custom, and bases it 
upon direct ethical intuition. 

In this way the religions evolved towards 
more individualistic forms, shedding their 
exclusively communal aspect. The individual 
became the religious unit in the place of the 
community; the tribal dance lost its impor- 
tance compared to the individual prayer; and, 
for the few, the individual prayer merged into 
justification through individual insight. 

So to-day it is not France which goes to 

[36] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


heaven, but individual Frenchmen; and it is 
not China which attains nirvana, but China- 
men. 

During this epoch of struggle—as in most 
religious struggles—the judgments passed by 
the innovators on the less-developed religious 
forms were very severe. The condemnation of 
idolatry pervades the Bible; and there are 
traces of a recoil which go further: “I hate, 
I despise your feast days,” writes Amos, 
speaking in the name of Jehovah. 

Such criticism is wanted. Indeed history, 
down to the present day, is a melancholy 
record of the horrors which can attend 
religion: human sacrifice, and in particular 
the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual | 
orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between 
races, the maintenance of degrading customs, 
hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge. 
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. 
The uncritical association of religion with 
goodness is directly negatived by plain facts. 
Religion can be, and has been, the main 

[37] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


instrument for progress. But if we survey the 
whole race, we must pronounce that generally 
it has not been so: “Many are called, but 
few are chosen.” 
VI. THE ASCENT OF MAN 

At different epochs in history new factors 
emerge and successively assume decisive im- 
portance in their influence on the ascent, or 
the descent, of races of mankind. Within the| 
millennium preceding the birth of Christ, the 
communal religions were ceasing to be engines 
of progress. On the whole, they had served 
humanity well. By their agency, the sense of 
social unity and of social responsibility had 
been quickened. The common cult gave ex- 
pression to the emotion of being a hundred 
per cent tribal. The explicit emotions of a 
life finding its interest in activities not di- 
rected to its own preservation were fostered by 
them. Also they produced concrete beliefs 
which embodied, however waveringly, the 
justification for these emotions. 

But at a certain stage in history, though 

[38] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


still elements in the preservation of the social 
structure, they ceased to be engines of prog- 
ress, ‘Their work was done. 

They were salving the old virtues which had 
made the race the great society that it had 
been, and were not straining forward towards 
the new virtues to make the common life the 
City of God that it should be. They were 
religions of the average, and the average is at 
war with the ideal. 

Human thought had broken through the 
limited horizon of the one social structure. The 
world as a whole entered into the explicit 
consciousness. The facility for individual 
wandering in comparative safety produced 
this enlargement of thought. A tribe which 
is wandering as a unit amid dangers may 
pick up new ideas, but it will strengthen its 
sense of tribal unity in the face of a hostile 
environment, 

But an individual who travels meets stran- 
gers on terms of kindliness. He returns home, 
and in his person and by his example pro- 

[39] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


motes the habit of thinking dispassionately 
beyond the tribe. The history of rational 
religion is full of tales of disengagement from 
the immediate social routine. If we keep to 
the Bible: Abraham wandered, the Jews were 
carried off to Babylon and after two genera- 
tions were allowed to return peacefully, St. 
Paul’s conversion was on a journey, and his 
theology was elaborated amid travels. This 
millennium was an age of travel; among the 
Greeks, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Xeno- 
phon, Aristotle, exemplify their times. The 
sreat empires and trading facilities made travel- 
ling easy; everyone travelled and found the 
world fresh and new. A _ world-consciousness 
was produced. 

In India and China the growth of a world- 
consciousness was different in its details, but 
in its essence depended on the same factors. 
Individuals were disengaged from their im- 
mediate social setting in ways which promoted 
thought. 

Now, so far as concerns religion, the distinc- 

[40] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


tion of a world-consciousness as contrasted 
with a social consciousness is the change of 
emphasis in the concept of rightness. A 
social consciousness concerns people whom you 
know and love individually. Hence, rightness 
is mixed up with the notion of preservation. 
Conduct is right which will lead some god to 
protect you; and it is wrong if it stirs some 
irascible being to compass your destruction. 
Such religion is a branch of diplomacy. But 
a world-consciousness is more disengaged. It 
rises to the conception of an essential rightness 
of things. The individuals are indifferent, 
because unknown. The new, and almost 
profane, concept of the goodness of God 
replaces the older emphasis on the will of God. 
In a communal religion you study the will of 
God in order that He may preserve you; in a 
purified religion, rationalized under the influ- 
ence of the world-concept, you study his good- 
ness in» order’ to be like him. It is the 
difference between the enemy you conciliate 
and the companion whom you imitate. 


[41] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


VII. THE FINAL CONTRAST 


A survey of religious history has disclosed 
that the coming of rational religion is the 
consequence of the growth of _a_world-con- 
sciousness. ‘The later:phases of the antecedent 
communal type of religion are dominated by 
the conscious reaction of human nature to the 
social organization in which it finds itself. 
Such reaction is partly emotion clothing itself 
in belief and ritual, and partly reason justify- 
ing practice by the test of social preservation. 
Rational religion is the wider conscious reac- 
tion of men to the universe in which they find 
themselves. 

Communal religion broadened itself to the 
verge of rationalism. In its last stages in 
the Western World we find the religion of the 
Roman Empire, in which the widest possible 
view of the social structure is adopted. The 
cult of the Empire was the sort of religion 
which might be constructed to-day by the Law 
School of a University, laudably impressed by 

[42] 


RELIGION IN HISTORY 


the notion that mere penal repression is not 
the way to avert a crime wave. Indeed, if we 
study the mentality of the Emperor Augustus 
and of the men who surrounded him, this is 
not far off from the true description of its 
final step in evolution. 

Another type of modified communal reli- 
gion was reached by the Jews. Their religion 
embodied general ideas as to the nature of 


things which were entirely expressed in terms 
of their relevance to the Jewish race. ‘This 
compromise was very effective, but very un- 
stable. It is a type of religious settlement to 
which communities are always reverting. In 
the modern world it is the religion of emo- 
tional statesmen, captains of industry, and 
social reformers. In the case of the Jews the 
crises to which it led were the birth of 
Christianity, and the forcible dispersion of the 
Jews by the military might of Rome. The 
same type of religion in our generation was 
one of the factors which led to the great war. 
It leads to the morbid exaggeration of national 
[43] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


self-consciousness: It lacks the element of 
quietism. Generality is the salt of religion. 

When Christianity had established itself 
throughout the Roman Empire and its neigh- 
bourhood, there were before the world two 
main rational religions, Buddhism and Chris- 
tianity. There were, of course, many rivals to 
both of them in their respective regions; but 
if we have regard to clarity of idea, generality 
of thought, moral respectability, survival 
power, and width of extension over the world, 
then for their combination of all these quali- 
ties these religions stood out beyond their 
competitors. Later their position was chale 
lenged by the Mahometans. But even to-day, 
the two Catholic religions of civilization are 
Christianity and Buddhism, and—if we are 
to judge by the comparison of their position 
now with what it has been—both of them are 
in decay. They have lost their ancient hold 
upon the world. 


[442 


II 
RELIGION AND DOGMA 





Il 
RELIGION AND DOGMA 


I. THE RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS 
IN HISTORY 


The great rational religions are the outcome 
of the emergence of a religious consciousness 
which is universal, as distinguished from tri- 
bal, or even social. Because it is universal, 
it introduces the note of solitariness. Reli-' 
gion is what the individual does with his 
solitariness. 

The reason of this connection between 
universality and solitariness is that univer- 
sality is a disconnection from immediate sur- 
roundings. It is an endeavour to find 
something permanent and intelligible by which 
to interpret the confusion of immediate detail. 

This element of detachment in religion is 
more particularly exhibited in the great re- 

[47] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


flective books of the Old Testament. In this 
group of books we find a conscious search 
after general principles. In other books, 
current ideas are assumed and are applied to 
the troubles of what was then the immediate 
present. Such books exemplify the state of 
thought of their times as in controversy, but they 
do not exhibit a process of reflective formation. 

In the reflective books the effort is not to 
reform society, or even to express religious 
emotion. There is a self-conscious endeavour 
to apprehend some general principles. 

In the book of Job we find the picture of a 
man suffering from an almost fantastic array 
of the evils characteristic of his times. He is 
tearing to pieces the sophism that all is for 
the best in the best of possible worlds, and 
that the justice of God is beautifully evident 
in everything that happens. ‘The essence of 
the book of Job is the contrast of a general 
principle, or dogma, and the particular circum- 
stances to which it should apply. There is 
also throughout the book the undercurrent of 

[48] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


fear lest an old-fashioned tribal god might 
take offense at this rational criticism. 

No religion which faces facts can minimize 
the evil in the world, not merely the moral 
evil, but the pain and the suffering. The 
book of Job is the revolt against the facile 
solution, so esteemed by fortunate people, 
that the sufferer is the evil person. 

Both the great religions, Christianity and 
Buddhism, have their separate set of dogmas 
which deal with this great question. It is in 
respect to the problem of evil that one great 
divergence between them exists. Buddhism 
finds evil essential in the very nature of the 
world of physical and emotional experience. 
The wisdom which it inculcates is, therefore, 
so to conduct life as to gain a release from 
the individual personality which is the ve- 
hicle for such experience. ‘The Gospel which 
it preaches is the method by which this 
release can be obtained. 

One metaphysical fact about the nature of 
things which it presupposes is that this re- 

[49] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


lease is not to be obtained by mere physica] 
death. Buddhism is the most colossal example 
in history of applied metaphysics. 

Christianity took the opposite road. It has 
always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, 
in contrast to Buddhism which is a meta- 
physic generating a religion. The defect of a 
‘metaphysical system is the very fact that it 
is a neat little system of thought, which 
thereby over-simplifies its expression of the 
world. Christianity has, in its _ historical 
development, struggled with another diff- 
culty, namely, the fact that it has no clear-cut 
separation from the crude fancies of the older 
tribal religions. 

But Christianity has one advantage. It is 
difficult to develop Buddhism, because Bud- 
dhism starts with a clear metaphysical notion 
and with the doctrines which flow from it. 
Christianity has retained the easy power of 
development. It starts with a tremendous 
notion about the world. But this notion is 
not derived from a metaphysical doctrine, but 
from our comprehension of the sayings and 
| [50] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


actions of certain supreme lives. It is the 
genius of the religion to point at the facts and 
ask for their systematic interpretation. In 
the Sermon on the Mount, in the Parables, 
and in their accounts of Christ, the Gospels 
exhibit a tremendous fact. The doctrine may, 
or may not, lie on the surface. But what is 
primary is the religious fact. The Buddha 
left a tremendous doctrine. ‘The historical 
facts about him are subsidiary to the doctrine. 

In respect to its treatment of evil, Chris- 
tianity is, therefore, less clear in its meta- 
physical ideas, but more inclusive of the facts. 
In the first place, it admits the evil as in- 
herent throughout the world. But it holds 
that such evil is not the necessary outcome 
of the very fact of individual personality. It 
derives the evil from the contingent fact of 
the actual course of events; it thus allows 
of an ideal as conceivable in terms of what is 
actual. 

Christianity, like Buddhism, preaches a 
doctrine of escape. It proclaims a doctrine 
whereby, through the treatment of evil, life is 


[51] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


placed on a finer level. It overcomes evil 
with good. Buddhism makes itself probable 
by referring to its metaphysical theory. Chris- 
tianity makes itself probable by referring to 
supreme religious moments in history. 

Thus in respect to this crucial question of 
evil, Buddhism and Christianity are in entirely 
different attitudes in respect to doctrine. 
Buddhism starts with the elucidatory dogmas; 
Christianity starts with the elucidatory facts. 

The problem of evil is only one among the 
interests of rational religious thought. 
Another is the search after wisdom. In the 
Book of Proverbs, in Ecclesiastes, and, among 
the books of the Apocrypha, in the Wisdom of 
Solomon, and in Ecclesiasticus, we find the 
record of reflection upon general prin- 
ciples embodied in proverbs, reflective, witty, 
and homely. 

The search after wisdom has its origin in 
generalizations from experience: 

Two things have I required of thee; 
deny me them not before I die: 
[52] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


Remove far from me vanity and lies: 
give me neither poverty nor riches; feed 
me with food convenient for me: 

Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, 
Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and 
steal, and take the name of my God in 
vain! 

(Proverbs xxx. 7, 8, 9.) 

The habit of reading the more exciting 
denunciations of the prophets is apt to conceal 
from us the amount of detached, middle-class 
common sense which also contributed to the 
religious tradition of the Jews. There is a 
keen appreciation of actual fact, even when 
the moral is not over-clear. For example: 

I returned, and saw under the sun, 
that the race is not to the swift, nor the 
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to 
the wise, nor yet riches to men of under- 
standing, nor yet favour to men of skill; 


but time and chance happeneth to them 
all. 


(Ecclesiastes ix. 11.) 
[53] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


These two quotations express incontestable 
general truths, verified by the cynical wisdom 
of ages; and yet they are religion at a very 
low temperature. The point, thus illustrated, 
is that a rational religion must not confine 
itself to moments of emotional excitement. 
It must find its verification at all tempera- 
tures. It must admit the wisdom of the 
golden mean, in its season and for those whom 
it can claim by right of possession; and it 
must admit “‘that time and chance happeneth 
to them all.” 

The collection of Psalms is not properly a 
reflective book. It is an expressive book. It 
expresses the emotions natural to states of 
mind hovering between a universal and a 
tribal religious conception. There is joy in 
the creative energy of a supreme ruler who is 
also a tribal champion. There is the glori- 
fication of power, magnificent and barbaric: 

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness 
thereof; the world, and they that dwell 


therein. 
[54] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


Who is this King of glory? The Lord 
of hosts, he is the King of glory. 
(Psalms xxiv.) 


Magnificent literature! But there is no solu- 
tion here of the difficulties which haunted Job. 
This worship of glory arising from power is 
not only dangerous: it arises from a barbaric 
conception of God. I suppose that even the 
world itself could not contain the bones of those 
slaughtered because of men intoxicated by its 
attraction. ‘This view of the universe, in the 
guise of an Eastern empire ruled by a glorious 
tyrant, may have served its purpose. In its 
historical setting, it marks a religious ascent. 
The psalm quoted gives us its noblest expres- 
sion. ‘The other side comes out in the psalms 
expressing hate, psalms now generally with- 
drawn from public worship. The glorification 
of power has broken more hearts than it has 
healed. 

Buddhism and Christianity find their ori- 
gins respectively in two inspired moments of 


[55] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


history: the life of the Buddha, and the life 
of Christ. The Buddha gave his doctrine to 
enlighten the world: Christ gave his life. It 
is for Christians to discern the doctrine. Per- 
haps in the end the most valuable part of 
the doctrine of the Buddha is its interpreta- 
tion of his life. 

We do not possess a systematic detailed 
record of the life of Christ; but we do pos- 
sess a peculiarly vivid record of the first 
response to it in the minds of the first group 
of his disciples after the lapse of some years, 
with their recollections, interpretations, and 
incipient formularizations. 

What we find depicted is a thoroughgoing 
rationalization of the Jewish religion carried 
through with a boundless naiveté, and mo- 
tived by a first-hand intuition into the na- 
ture of things. 

The reported sayings of Christ are not 
formularized thought. ‘They are descriptions 
of direct insight. The ideas are in his mind as 


[56] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


immediate pictures, and not as analyzed 
in terms of abstract concepts. He sees 
intuitively the relations between good men 
and bad men; his expressions are not cast 
into the form of an analysis of the goodness 
and badness of man. His sayings are actions 
and not adjustments of concepts. He speaks 
in the lowest abstractions that language 
is capable of, if it is to be language at all 
and not the fact itself. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, and in the 
Parables, there is no reasoning about the 
facts. They are seen with immeasurable 
innocence. Christ represents rationalism de- 
rived from direct intuition and divorced from 
dialectics. 

The life of Christ is not an exhibition of 
over-ruling power. Its glory is for those who 
can discern it, and not for the world. Its 
power lies in its absence of force. It has 
the decisiveness of a supreme ideal, and that 
is why the history of the world divides at 
this point of time. 

[57] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


II. THE DESCRIPTION OF RELIGIOUS 
EXPERIENCE 


The dogmas of religion are the attempts to 
formulate in precise terms the truths dis- 
closed in the religious experience of mankind. 
In exactly the same way the dogmas of 
physical science are the attempts to formu- 
late in precise terms the truths disclosed in 
the sense-perception of mankind. 

In the previous section we have been con- 
sidering religious experience in the concrete; 
we have now to define its general character. 
Some general descriptions of religion were 
given in the former lecture. It was stated 
that “Religion is force of belief cleansing 
the inward parts’; and again, that ‘Religion 
is the art and theory of the internal life of 
man, so far as it depends on the man him- 
self, and on what is permanent in the nature 
of things”: and again, “Religion is what the 
individual does with his own solitariness.”’ 

This point of the origin of rational religion 
in solitariness is fundamental. Religion is 

[58] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


founded on the concurrence of three allied 
concepts in one moment of self-consciousness, 
concepts whose separate relationships to fact 
and whose mutual relations to each other are 
only to be settled jointly by some direct 
intuition into the ultimate character of the 
universe. 

These concepts are: - 

1. That of the value of an individual | 
for itself. 

2. That of the value of the diverse 
individuals of the world for each other. 

3. That of the value of the objective 
world which is a community derivative 
from the interrelations of its component 
individuals, and also necessary for the 
existence of each of these individuals. 

The moment of religious consciousness starts 
from self-valuation, but it broadens into 
the concept of the world as a realm of ad- 
justed values, mutually intensifying or mu- 
tually destructive. The intuition into the 
actual world gives a particular definite con- 

[59] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


tent to the bare notion of a principle deter- 
mining the grading of values. It also exhibits 
emotions, purposes, and physical conditions, 
as subservient factors in the emergence of 
value. 

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, 
in the way of value, is the attainment of 
life? And it can find no such value till it 
has merged its individual claim with that of 
the objective universe. Religion is world- 
loyalty. 

The spirit at once surrenders itself to this 
universal claim and appropriates it for itself. 
So far as it is dominated by religious ex- 
perience, life is conditioned by this forma- 
tive principle, equally individual and general, 
equally actual and beyond completed act, 
equally compelling recognition and _ permis- 
sive of disregard. 

This principle is not a dogmatic formula- 
tion, but the intuition of immediate occasions 
as failing or succeeding in reference to the 
ideal relevant to them. There is a rightness 

[60] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


attained or missed, with more or less com- 
pleteness of attainment or omission. 

This is a revelation of character, appre- 
hended as we apprehend the characters of 
our friends. But in this case it is an appre- 
hension of character permanently inherent 
in the nature of things. 

There is a large concurrence in the nega- 
tive doctrine that this religious experience 
does not include any direct intuition of a 
definite person, or individual. It is a char- 
acter of permanent rightness, whose inherence 
in the nature of things modifies both effi- 
cient and final cause, so that the one con- 
forms to harmonious conditions, and the 
other contrasts itself with an harmonious 
ideal. ‘The harmony in the actual world 
is conformity with the character. 

It is not true that every individual item 
of the universe conforms to this character 
in every detail. There will be some measure 
of conformity and some measure of diversity. 
The whole intuition of conformity and. di-— 


[61] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


versity forms the contrast which that item 
yields for the religious experience. So far as 
the conformity is incomplete, there is evil in 
the world. 

The evidence for the assertion of general, 
though not universal, concurrence in the 
doctrine of no direct vision of a personal 
God, can only be found by a consideration 
of the religious thought in the civilized 
world. Here the sources of the evidence can 
only be indicated. 

Throughout India and China _ religious 
thought, so far as it has been interpreted in 
precise form, disclaims the intuition of any 
ultimate personality substantial to the uni- 
verse. This is true for Confucian philosophy, 
Buddhist philosophy, and Hindoo philosophy. 
There may be personal embodiments, but the 
substratum is impersonal. 

Christian theology has also, in the main, 
adopted the position that there is no direct | 
intuition of such an ultimate personal sub- 
stratum for the world. It maintains the 


[62] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


doctrine of the existence of a personal God 
as a truth, but holds that our belief in it is 
based upon inference. Most theologians hold 
that this inference is sufficiently obvious to 
be made by all men upon the basis of their 
individual personal experience. But, be this 
as it may, it is an inference and not a direct 
intuition. This is the general doctrine of 
those traditionalist churches which more 
especially claim the title of Catholic; and 
contrary doctrines have, I believe, been offi- 
cially condemned by the Roman Catholic 
Church: for example, the religious philosophy 
of Rosmini. 

Greek thought, when it began to scrutinize 
the traditional cults, took the same line. In 
some form or other all attempts to formulate 
the doctrines of a rational religion in ancient 
Greece took their stand upon the Pythagorean 
notion of a direct intuition of a righteousness 
in the nature of things, functioning as a 
condition, a critic, and an ideal. Divine 
personality was in the nature of an inference 

[63] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


from the directly apprehended law of nature, 
so far as it was inferred. Of course, there 
were many cults of divine persons within the 
nature of things. ‘The question in discussion 
concerns a divine person, substrate to the 
nature of things. 

This question of the ultimate nature of 
direct religious experience is very funda- 
mental to the religious situation of the 
modern world. In the first place, if you 
make religious experience to be the direct 
intuition of a personal being substrate to the 
universe, there is no widespread basis of 
agreement to appeal to. The main streams 
of religious thought start with direct contra- 
dictions to each other. For those who 
proceed in this way, and it is a usual form of 
modern appeal, there is only one hope—to 
supersede reason by emotion. ‘Then you can 
prove anything, except to reasonable people. 
But reason is the safeguard of the objectivity 
of religion: it secures for it the general coher- 
ence denied to hysteria. 

- Another objection against this appeal to 
[64] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


such an intuition, merely experienced in 
exceptional moments, is that the intuition 
is thereby a function of these moments. 
Anything which explains the origin of such 
moments, in respect to their emotional ac- 
companiments, can then fairly be taken to 
be an explanation of the intuition. Thus the 
intuition becomes a private psychological 
habit, and is without general evidential force. 
This is the psychological interpretation which 
is fatal to evidence unable to maintain 
itself at all emotional temperatures amid 
great variety of environment. 

Here a distinction must be drawn. In- 
tuitions may first emerge as distinguished in 
consciousness under exceptional  circum- 
stances. But when some distinct idea has 
been once experienced, or suggested, it should 
then have its own independence of irrele- 
vancies. Thus we may not know some 
arithmetical truth, and require some excep- 
tional help to detect it. But when known, 
arithmetic is a permanent possession. ‘The 
psychological interpretation, assigning a merely 

[65] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


personal significance, holds when objective 
validity is claimed for an intuition which is 
only experienced in a set of discrete circum- 
stances of definite specific character. The 
intuition may be clearer under such circum- 
stances, but it should not be confined to them. 

The wisdom of the main stream of Christian 
theology in refusing to countenance the notion 
of a direct vision of a personal God is mani- 
fest. For there is no consensus. ‘The sub- 
ordinate gods of the unrationalized religions— 
the religions of the heathen, as they are called 
—are not to the point; and when the great 
rationalized religions are examined, the major- 
ity lies the other way. As soon, however, 
as it comes to a question of rational interpre- 
tation, numbers rapidly sink in importance. 
Reason mocks at majorities. 

But there is a large consensus, on the 
part of those who have rationalized their 
outlook, in favour of the concept of a right- 
ness in things, partially conformed to and 
partially disregarded. So far as there is 

[66] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


conscious determination of actions, the at- 
tainment of this conformity is an ultimate 
premise by reference to which our choice of 
immediate ends is criticised and swayed, 
The rational satisfaction or dissatisfaction in 
respect to any particular happening depends 
upon an intuition which is capable of being 
universalized. This universalization of what 
is discerned in a particular instance is the 
appeal to a general character inherent in 
the nature of things. 

This intuition is not the discernment of a 
form of words, but of a type of character. 
It is characteristic of the learned mind to 
exalt words. Yet mothers can ponder many 
things in their hearts which their lips cannot 
express. These many things, which are thus 
known, constitute the ultimate religious evi- 
dence, beyond which there is no appeal. 


III. GOD 


To-day there is but one religious dogma in. 
debate: What do you mean by ‘God’? 


[67] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


And in this respect, to-day is like all its 
yesterdays. This is the fundamental reli- 
gious dogma, and all other dogmas are sub- 
sidiary to it. 

There are three main simple renderings of 
this concept before the world: 

1. The Eastern Asiatic concept of an 
impersonal order to which the world 
conforms. This order is the self-ordering 
of the world; it is not the world obeying 
an imposed rule. The concept expresses 
the extreme doctrine of immanence. 

2. The Semitic concept of a definite 
personal individual entity, whose exist- 
ence is the one ultimate metaphysical 
fact, absolute and underivative, and who 
decreed and ordered the derivative ex- 
istence which we call the actual world. 
This Semitic concept is the rationaliza- 
tion of the tribal gods of the earlier 
communal religions. It expresses the 
extreme doctrine of transcendence. 

3. The Pantheistic concept of an entity 

[68] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


to be described in the terms of the 
‘Semitic concept, except that the actual 
world is a phase within the complete 
fact which is this ultimate individual 
entity. The actual world, conceived 
apart from God, is unreal. Its only 
reality is God’s reality. The actual 
world has the reality of being a partial 
description of what God is. But in it- 
self it is merely a certain mutuality of 
“‘appearance,” which is a phase of the 
being of God. This is the extreme doc- 
trine of monism. 


It will be noticed that the Eastern Asiatic 


concept and the Pantheistic concept invert 
each other. According to the former concept, 
when we speak of God we are saying some- 


thing about the world; and according to the 
latter concept, when we speak of the world 


we are saying something about God. 


The Semitic concept and the Eastern Asi- 


atic concept are directly opposed to each 
other, and any mediation between them must 


[69] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


lead to complexity of thought. It is evident 
that the Semitic concept can very easily pass 
over into the Pantheistic concept. In fact, 
the history of philosophical theology in various 
Mahometan countries—Persia, for instance— 
shows that this passage has often been 
effected. 
The main difficulties which the Semitic 
concept has to struggle with are two in 
number. One of them is that it leaves God 
completely outside metaphysical rationaliza- 
tion. We know, according to it, that He is 
such a being as to design and create this 
universe, and there our knowledge stops. If 
we mean by his goodness that He is the one 
self-existent, complete entity, then He is 
good. But such goodness must not be con- 
fused with the ordinary goodness of daily 
life. He is undeniably useful, because any- 
thing baffling can be ascribed to his direct 
decree. 
The second difficulty of the concept is to 
get itself proved. The only possible proof 
[70] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


would appear to be the ‘“‘ontological proof” 
devised by Anselm, and revived by Descartes. 
According to this proof, the mere concept of 
such an entity allows us to infer its existence. 
Most philosophers and theologians reject this 
proof: for example, it is explicitly rejected by 
Cardinal Mercier in his Manual of Scholastic 
Philosophy. 

Any proof which commences with the 
consideration of the character of the actual 
world cannot rise above the actuality of this 
world. It can only discover all the factors 
‘disclosed in the world as experienced. In 
other words, it may discover an immanent 
God, but not a God wholly transcendent. 
The difficulty can be put in this way: by 
considering the world we can find all the 
factors required by the total metaphysical 
situation; but we cannot discover anything 
not included in this totality of actual fact, 
and yet explanatory of it. 

Christianity has not adopted any one of 
these clear alternatives. It has been true to 


[71] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


its genius for keeping its metaphysics sub- 
ordinate to the religious facts to which it 
appeals. 

In the first place, it inherited the simple 
Semitic concept. All its founders naturally 
expressed themselves in those terms, and were 
addressing themselves to an audience who 
coutd only understand religion thus expressed. 

But even here important qualifications have 
to be made. Christ himself introduces them. 
How far they were then new, or ‘how 
far he is utilizing antecedent thoughts, is im- 
material. The point is the decisive emphasis 
the notions receive in his teaching. The 
first point is the association of God with the 
Kingdom of Heaven, coupled with the expla- 
nation that ““The Kingdom of Heaven is 
within you.” The second point is the con- 
cept of God under the metaphor of a Father. 
The implications of this latter notion are 
expanded with moving insistence in the two 
Epistles by St. John, the author of the 

[72] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


Gospel. To him we owe the phrase, “God is 
love.” 

Finally, in the Gospel of St. John, by the 
introduction of the doctrine of the Logos, a 
clear move is made towards the modification 


of the notion of the unequivocal personal 
unity of the Semitic God. Indeed, for most 


Christian Churches, the simple Semitic doc-. 
trine 1s now a heresy, both by reason of the 
modification of personal unity and also by 
the insistence on immanence. 

The notion of immanence must be discrimi- 
nated from that of omniscience. ‘The Semitic 
God is omniscient; but, in addition to that, 
the Christian God is a factor in the uni- 
verse. A few years ago a papyrus was 
found in an Egyptian tomb which proved to 
be an early Christian compilation called 
“The Sayings of Christ.” Its exact authen- 
ticity and its exact authority do not concern 
us. I am quoting it as evidence of the 
mentality of many Christians in Egypt during 
the first few Christian centuries. At that 

[73] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


date Egypt supplied the theological leaders of 
Christian thought. We find in these Logia 
of Christ the saying, ‘““Cleave the wood, and 
I am there.” This is merely one example 
of an emphatic assertion of immanence, and 
shows a serious divergence from the Semitic 
concept. 

Immanence is a well-known modern doc- 
trine. The points to.be noticed are that it 
is implicit in various parts of the New Testa- 
ment, and was explicit in the first theological 
epoch of Christianity. Christian theology 
was then Platonic; it followed John rather 
than Paul. 


IV. THE QUEST OF GOD 


The modern world has lost God and is 
seeking him. The reason for the loss 
stretches far back in the history of Christi- 
anity. In respect to its doctrine of God the 
Church gradually returned to the Semitic 
concept, with the addition of the threefold 
personality. It is a concept which is clear, 

[74] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


terrifying, and unprovable. It was supported 
by an unquestioned religious tradition. It 
was also supported by the conservative in- 
stinct of society, and by a history and a 
metaphysic both constructed expressly for 
that purpose. Moreover, to dissent was 
death. 

On the whole, the Gospel of love was 
turned into a Gospel of fear. The Christian 
world was composed of terrified populations. 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
knowledge,” says the Proverb (i.7). Yet this is 
an odd saying, if it be true that ‘God is 
love.” 

“In flaming fire taking vengeance on 
them that know not God, and that 
obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus 
Christ’; says Paul. 

“Who shall be punished with everlasting 
destruction from the presence of the 
Lord, and from the glory of his power.” 
(I Thessalonians i. 8, 9.) 

[75] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


The populations did well to be terrified at 
such ambiguous good tidings, which lost no 
emphasis in their promulgation. 

If the modern world is to find God, it 
must find him through love and not through 
fear, with the help of John and not of Paul. 
Such a conclusion is true and represents a 
commonplace of modern thought. But it is 
only a very superficial rendering of the facts. 

As a rebound from dogmatic intolerance, 
the simplicity of religious truth has been a 
favorite axiom of liberalizing theologians. It 
is dificult to understand upon what evidence 
this notion is based. In the physical world 
as science advances, we discern a complexity 
of interrelations. There is a certain sim- 
plicity of dominant ideas, but modern physics 
does not disclose a simple world. 

To reduce religion to a few simple notions 
seems an arbitrary solution of the problem 
before us. It may be common sense; but 
is it true? In view of the horrors produced 
by bigotry, it is natural for sensitive thinkers 
to minimize religious dogmas. But such 
pragmatic reasons are dangerous guides. 

[76] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


This procedure ends by basing religion on 
those few ideas which in the circumstances of 
the time are most effective in producing 
pleasing emotions and agreeable conduct. If 
our trust is in the ultimate power of reason 
as a discipline for the discernment of truth, 
we have no right to impose such a #rior1 
conditions. All simplifications of religious 
dogma are shipwrecked upon the rock of the 
problem of evil. 

As a particular application, we may believe | 
that the various doctrines about God have 
not suffered chiefly from their complexity. 
They have represented extremes of simplicity, 
so far as they have been formulated for the 
great rationalistic religions. The three ex- 
tremes of simple notions should not represent 
in our eyes mutually exclusive concepts, from 
among which we are to choose one and reject 
the others. 

It cannot be true that contradictory no- 
tions can apply to the same fact. Thus 
reconcilement of these cantrary concepts must 

[77] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


be sought in a more searching analysis of the 
meaning of the terms in which they are 
phrased. 

The man who refused to admit that two and 
two make four, until he knew what use was to be 
made of this premise, had some justification. 
At a certain abstract level of thought, such 
statements are absolutely true. But once you 
desert that level, you admit fundamental 
transformations of meaning. Language cloaks 
the most profound ideas under its simplest 
words. For example, in “two and two make 
four,” the words “and” and “make” entirely 
depend for their meaning upon the application 
which you are giving to the statement. 

Analogously, in expressing our conception of 
God, words such as “‘personal’ and “imper- 
sonal,” “entity,” “individuality,” "*"actiaias 
require the closest careful watching, lest in dif- 
ferent connections we should use them in 
different senses, not to speak of the danger of 
failing to use them in any determinate sense. 

But it is impossible to fix the sense of fun- 
damental terms except by reference to some 

[78] 


RELIGION AND DOGMA 


definite metaphysical way of conceiving the 
most penetrating description of the universe. 

Thus rational religion must have recourse 
to metaphysics for a scrutiny of its terms. At 
the same time it contributes its own inde- 
pendent evidence, which metaphysics must 
take account of in framing its description. 

This mutual dependence is illustrated in all 
topics. For example, I have mentioned above 
that in modern Europe history and metaphys- 
ics have been constructed with the purpose of 
supporting the Semitic concept of God. To 
some extent this is justifiable, because both 
history and metaphysics must presuppose some 
canons by which to guide themselves. 

The result is that you cannot confine any 
important reorganization to one sphere of 
thought above. You cannot shelter theology 
from science, or science from theology; nor 
can you shelter either of them from meta- 
physics, or metaphysics from either of them. 
There is no short cut to truth. 

Religion, therefore, while in the framing of 
dogmas it must admit modifications from the 

[79] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


complete circle of our knowledge, still brings 
its own contribution of immediate experience. 
_ That contribution is in the first place the 
recognition that our existence is more than a 
succession of bare facts. We live in a common 
world of mutual adjustment, of intelligible 
relations, of valuations, of zest after purposes, 
of joy and grief, of interest concentrated on 
self, of interest directed beyond self, of short- 
time and long-time failures or successes, of 
different layers of feeling, of life-weariness and 
of life-zest. | 

There is a quality of life which lies always 
beyond the mere fact of life; and when we 
include the quality in the fact, there is still 
omitted the quality of the quality. It is not 
true that the finer quality is the direct associ- 
ate of obvious happiness or obvious pleasure. 
Religion is the direct apprehension that, 
beyond such happiness and such pleasure, 
there remains the function of what is actual 
and passing, that it contributes its quality as 
an immortal fact to the order which informs 
the world. 

[80] 


III 
BODY AND SPIRIT 





a 
. 
> 
y . ye a 
aT 
= 
& “ 
he : f, 
- 
ne 2 & 
‘ be i = > 
- - - — 


jivtlay 


4 


’ 
’ 
i, 
f 
n 
af 





- “- ~ > =e 
* a ae = 
-* - : — a 
a 3 < =a > s NL 
noe ea Se 7 
c ale = oe = = 
~ No wre. ~ 


II] 
BODY AND SPIRIT 


I. RELIGION AND METAPHYSICS 


Religion requires a metaphysical backing; 
for its authority is endangered by the intensity 
of the emotions which it generates. Such 
emotions are evidence of some vivid experi-. 
ence; but they are a very poor guarantee for 
its correct interpretation. 

Thus dispassionate criticism: of religious be- 
lief is beyond all things necessary. The foun- 
dations of dogma must be laid in a rational 
metaphysics which criticises meanings, and 
endeavours to express the most general con- | 
cepts adequate for the all-inclusive universe, 

This position has never been seriously 
doubted, though in practice it is often evaded. 
One of the most serious periods of neglect 

[83] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


occurred in the middle of the nineteenth 
century, through the dominance of the histori- 
cal interest. 

It is a curious delusion that the rock upon 
which our beliefs can be founded is an histori- 
cal investigation. You can only interpret the 
past in terms of the present. The present is 
all that you have; and unless in this present 
you can find general principles which interpret 
the present as including a representation of 
the whole community of existents, you cannot 
move a step beyond your little patch of im- 
mediacy. 

Thus history presupposes a metaphysic. It 
can be objected that we believe in the past 
and talk about it without settling our meta- 
physical principles. That is certainly the case. 
But you can only deduce metaphysical dogmas 
from your interpretation of the past on the 
basis of a prior metaphysical interpretation of 
the present.’ | 

‘By “metaphysics” I mean the science which seeks to discover the 


_ general ideas which are indispensably relevant to the analysis of every- 
thing that happens. 


[84] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are 
implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the 
lines of the present. But when it comes to 
the primary metaphysical data, the world of 
which you are immediately conscious is the 
whole datum. 

This criticism applies equally to a science or 
to a religion which hopes to justify itself without 
any appeal to metaphysics. The difference is 
that religion is the longing of the spirit that the 
facts of existence should find their justification 
in the nature of existence. ‘My soul thirsteth 
for God,” writes the Psalmist. 

But science can leave its metaphysics im- 
plicit and retire behind our belief in the prag- 
matic value of its general descriptions. If 
religion does that, it admits that its dogmas 
are merely pleasing ideas for the purpose of 
stimulating its emotions. Science (at least 
as a temporary methodological device) can 
rest upon a naive faith; religion is the longing 
for justification. When religion ceases to seek 
for penetration, for clarity, it is sinking back 

[85] 


is 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


into its lower forms. ‘The ages of faith are 
the ages of rationalism. 


II. THE CONTRIBUTION OF RELIGION TO 
METAPHYSICS 


In the previous lectures religious experience 
was considered as a fact. It consists of a cer- 
tain widespread, direct apprehension of a char- 
acter exemplified in the actual universe. Such 
a character includes in itself certain meta- 
physical presuppositions. In so far as we 
trust the objectivity of the religious intuitions, 
to that extent we must also hold that the 
metaphysical doctrines are well founded. 

It is for this reason that in the previous 
lecture the broadest view of religious experi- 
ence was insisted on. If, at this stage of 
thought, we include points of radical diver- 
gence between the main streams, the whole 
evidential force is indefinitely weakened. Thus 
religious experience cannot be taken as contrib- 
uting to metaphysics any direct evidence for 

[86] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


a personal God in any sense transcendent or 
creative. 

The universe, thus disclosed, is through and 
through interdependent. The body pollutes 
the mind, the mind pollutes the body. Physi- 
cal energy sublimates itself into zeal; con- 
versely, zeal stimulates the body. The bio- 
logical ends pass into ideals of standards, and 
the formation of standards affects the biologi- 
cal facts. The individual is formative of the 
society, the society is formative of the indi- 
vidual. Particular evils infect the whole 
world, particular goods point the way of 
escape. 

The world is at once a passing shadow and 
a final fact. The shadow is passing into the 
fact, so as to be constitutive of it; and yet 
the fact is prior to the shadow. There is a 
kingdom of heaven prior to the actual pas- 
sage of actual things, and there is the same 
kingdom finding its completion through the 
accomplishment of this passage. 

But just as the kingdom of heaven trans- 

[87] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


cends the natural world, so does this world 
transcend the kingdom of heaven. For the 
world is evil, and the kingdom is good. The 
kingdom is in the world, and yet not of the 
world. 

The actual world, the world of experiencing, 
and of thinking, and of physical activity, is a 
community of many diverse entities; and 
these entities contribute to, or derogate from, 
the common value of the total community. 
At the same time, these actual entities are, for 
themselves, their own value, individual and 
separable. They add to the common stock 
and yet they suffer alone. The world is a 
scene of solitariness in community. 

The individuality of entities is just as 
important as their community. The topic of 
religion is individuality in community. 


Ili, A METAPHYSICAL DESCRIPTION 


A metaphysics is a description, Its discus- 
sion so as to elucidate its accuracy is neces- 
sary, but it is foreign to the description. The 

[88] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


tests of accuracy are logical coherence, adequacy, 
and exemplification. A metaphysical descrip- 
tion takes its origin from one select field of 
interest. It receives its confirmation by estab- 
lishing itself as adequate and as exemplified in 
other fields of interest.1 The following descrip- 
tion is set out for immediate comparison with 
the deliverances of religious experience. 

There are many ways of analyzing » the 
universe, conceived as that which is compre- 
hensive of all that there is. In a description 
it is thus necessary to correlate these different 
routes of analysis. First, consider the analysis 
into (1) the actual world, passing in time; 
and (2) those elements which go to its formation. 

Such formative elements are not themselves 
actual and passing; they are the factors 
which are either non-actual or non-temporal, 
disclosed in the analysis of what is both actual 
and temporal. 

They constitute the formative character of 


1For the application to science of this description, cf. my Science and 
the Modern World. 


[89] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


the actual temporal world. We know nothing 

beyond this temporal world and the formative 

elements which jointly constitute its character. 

The temporal world and its formative elements 

constitute for us the all-inclusive universe. 
These formative elements are: 


1. The creativity whereby the actual 
world has its character of temporal pas- 
sage to novelty. 

2. The realm of ideal entities, or forms, 
which are in themselves not actual, but 
‘are such that they are exemplified in 
everything that is actual, according to 
some proportion of relevance. 

3. The actual but non-temporal entity 
whereby the indetermination of mere 
creativity is transmuted into a determi- 
nate freedom. This non-temporal actual 
entity is what men call God—the supreme 
God of rationalized religion. 


A further elucidation of the status of these 
formative elements is only to be obtained by 
[90] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


having recourse to another mode of analysis of 
the actual world. 

The actual temporal world can be analyzed 
into a multiplicity of occasions of actuali- 
zation. ‘These are the primary actual units of 
which the temporal world is composed. Call 
each such occasion an “epochal occasion.” 
Then the actual world is a community of 
epochal occasions. In the physical world 
each epochal occasion is a definite limited 
physical event, limited both as to space and 
time, but with time-duration as well as with 
its full spatial dimensions. 

The epochal occasions are the primary 
units of the actual community, and the com- 
munity is composed of the units. But each 


unit has in its nature a reference to every 
other member of the community, so that 


each unit is a microcosm representing in itself 
the entire all-inclusive universe. 

These epochal occasions are the creatures. 
The reason for the temporal character of the 
actual world can now be given by reference to 


[91] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


the creativity and the creatures. For the 
creativity is not separable from its creatures. 
Thus the creatures remain with the creativity. 
Accordingly, the creativity for a creature 
becomes the creativity with the creature, and 
thereby passes into another phase of itself. 
It is now the creativity for a new creature. 
Thus there is a transition of the creative 
action, and this transition exhibits itself, in 
the physical world, in the guise of routes of 
temporal succession. 

This protean character of the creativity 
forbids us from conceiving it as an actual 
entity. For its character lacks determinate- 
ness. | It equally prevents us from considering 
the temporal world as a definite actual crea- 
ture. For the temporal world is an essential 
incompleteness. It has not the character of a 
definite matter of fact, such as attaches to an 
event in past history, viewed from a present 
standpoint. 

An epochal occasion is a concretion. It is 


[92] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


a mode in which diverse elements come to- 
gether into a real unity. Apart from that’ 
concretion, these elements stand in mutual 
isolation. Thus an actual entity is the out- 
come of a creative synthesis, individual and 
passing. 

The various elements which are thus 
brought into unity are the other creatures and 
the ideal forms and God. These elements are 
not a mere unqualified aggregate. In such a 
case there could only be one creature. In the 
concretion the creatures are qualified by the 
ideal forms, and conversely the ideal forms are 
qualified by the creatures. Thus the epochal 
occasion, which is thus emergent, has in its 
own nature the other creatures under the 
aspect of these forms, and analogously it 
includes the forms under the aspect of these 
creatures. It is thus a definite limited crea- 
ture, emergent in consequence of the limitations 
thus mutually imposed on each other by the 
elements. 


[93] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


IV. GOD AND THE MORAL ORDER 

The inclusion of God in every creature 
shows itself in the determination whereby a 
definite result is emergent. God is that 
non-temporal actuality which has to be taken 
account of in every creative phase. Any such 
phase is determinate having regard to its 
antecedents, and in this determination ex- 
hibits conformity to a common order. 

The boundless wealth of possibility in the 
realm of abstract form would leave each 
creative phase still indeterminate, unable to 
synthesize under determinate conditions the 
creatures from which it springs. The definite 
determination which imposes ordered balance 
on the world requires an,actual entity impos- 
irg its own unchanged consistency of char- 
acter on every phase. 

Thus creative indetermination attains its 
measure of determination. A simpler meta- 
physic would result if we could stop at this 
conclusion. A complete determinism would 
thus mean the complete self-consistency of the 

[94] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


temporal world. This is the conclusion of all 
thinkers who are inclined to trust to the ade- 
quacy of metaphysical concepts. 

The difficulty of this conclusion comes when 
we confront the theory with the facts of the 
world. If the theory of complete determinism, 
by reason of the necessity of conformation 
with the nature of God, holds true, then the 
evil in the world is in conformity with the 
nature of God. 

Now evil is exhibited in physical suffering, 
mental suffering, and loss of the’ higher 
experience in favour of the lower experience. 
The common character of all evil is that its 
realization in fact involves that there is some 
concurrent realization of a purpose towards 
elimination. The purpose is to secure the 
avoidance of evil. The fact of the instability 
of evil is the moral order in the world. 

Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far 
good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its 
character of a destructive agent among things 
greater than itself. In the summation of the 

[95] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


more complete fact it has secured a descent 
towards nothingness, in contrast to the creative- 
ness of what can without qualification be termed 
vood. Evil is positive and destructive; what 
's good is positive and creative. 

This instability of evil does not necessarily 
lead to progress. On the contrary, the evil 
in itself leads to the world losing forms of 
attainment in which that evil manifests itself. 
Either the species ceases to exist, or it sinks 
back into a stage in which it ranks below the 
possibility of that form of evil. For example, 
a species whose members are always in pain 
will either cease to exist, or lose the delicacy 
of perception which results in that pain, or 
develop a finer and more subtle relationship 
among its bodily parts. 

Thus evil promotes its own elimination by 
destruction, or degradation, or by elevation. 
But in its own nature it is unstable. It must 
be noted that the state of degradation to 
which evil leads, when accomplished, is not in 
itself evil, except by comparison with what 

[96] 


BODY AND SPIRIT. 


might have been. A hog is not an evil beast, 
but when a man is degraded to the level of a 
hog, with the accompanying atrophy of finer 
elements, he is no more evil than a hog. The 
evil of the final degradation lies in the com- 
parison of what is with what might have been. 
During the process of degradation the com- 
parison is an evil for the man himself, and at 
its final stage it remains an evil for others. 

But in this last point respecting the evil for 
others, it becomes plain that, with a suffi- 
ciently comprehensive view, a stable state of 
final degradation is not reached. For the 
relationships with society and the indirect 
effects have to be taken into account. Also 
destruction when accomplished is not an evil 
for the thing destroyed. For there is no such 
thing. Again the evil lies in the loss to the 
social environment. There is evil when things 
are at cross purposes. 

The contrast in the world between evil and 
‘good is the contrast between the turbulence 
of evil and the “peace which passeth all 

[97] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


understanding.” There is a self-preservation 
inherent in that which is good in itself. Its 
destruction may come from without but not 
from within. Good people of narrow sympa- 
thies are apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive, 
enjoying their egotistical goodness. Their case, 
on a higher level, is analogous to that of the 
man completely degraded to a hog. They have 
reached a state of stable goodness, so far as 
their own interior life is concerned. ‘This 
type of moral correctitude is, on a larger 
view, so like evil that the distinction is 
trivial. 

Thus if God be an actual entity which 
enters into every creative phase and yet is 
above change, He must be exempt from 
internal inconsistency which is the note of 
evil. Since God is actual, He must include 
in himself a synthesis of the total universe. 
There is, therefore, in God’s nature the aspect 
of the realm of forms as qualified by the 
world, and the aspect of the world as quali- 
fied by the forms. His completion, so that 

L98] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


He is exempt from transition into something 
else, must mean that his nature remains 
self-consistent in relation to all change. 

Thus God is the measure of the aesthetic 
consistency of the world. There is some 
consistency in creative action, because it is 
conditioned by his immanence. 

If we trace the evil in the world to the 
determinism derived from God, then the incon- 
sistency in the world is derived from the con- 
sistency of God. Also the incompletion in 
the world is derivative from the completion 
of God. 

The temporal world exhibits two sides of 
itself. On one side it exhibits an order in 
matter of fact, and a self-contrast with ideals, 
which show that its creative passage is subject 
to the immanence of an unchanging actual 
entity. On the other side its incompletion, 
and its evil, show that the temporal world is 
to be construed in terms of additional forma- 
tive elements which are not definable in the 
terms which are applicable to God. 

[99] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


V. VALUE AND THE PURPOSE OF GOD 

The purpose of God is the attainment of 
value in the temporal world. An active 
purpose is the adjustment of the present for 
the sake of adjustment of value in the future, 
immediately or remotely. 

Value is inherent in actuality itself. To be 
an actual entity is to have a self-interest. 
This self-interest is a feeling of self-valuation; 
it is an emotional tone. The value of other 
things, not one’s self, is the derivative value 
of being elements contributing to this ultimate 
self-interest. This self-interest is the interest 
of what one’s existence, as in that epochal 
occasion, comes to. It is the ultimate enjoy- 
ment of being actual. 

But the actuality is the enjoyment, and 
this enjoyment is the experiencing of value. 
For an epochal occasion is a microcosm in- 
clusive of the whole universe. This unification 
of the universe, whereby its various elements 
are combined into aspects of each other, is an 
atomic unit within the real world. 

[100] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


Such an ultimate concrete fact is of the 
nature of an act of perceptivity. But, if we 
are speaking of the non-mental facts, such 
perceptivity is blind. It is without reflective 
consciousness; it is the self-value of its own 
microcosmic apprehension. ‘The self-value is 
the unit fact which emerges. In calling it a 
perceptivity, or an apprehension, we are 
already analyzing it into the separate ingre- 
dients which go to form the one emergent thing. 
Fach actual entity is an arrangement of the 
whole universe, actual and ideal, whereby 
there is constituted that self-value which is 
the entity itself. 

Thus the epochal occasion has two sides. 
On one side it is a mode of creativity bringing 
together the universe. This side is the oc- 
casion as the cause of itself, its own creative 
act. We are here conceiving the creation as 
the reverse of our analysis. For in our 
description we are holding the elements apart; 
whereas in the creation they are put together. 

On the other side, the occasion is the 

[101] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


creature. This creature is that one emergent 
fact. This fact is the self-value of the creative 
act. But there are not two actual entities, 
the creativity and the creature. ‘There is 
only one entity which is the self-creating 
creature. 

The description of the variety of aspects, 
under which the various actual occasions enter 
into each other’s natures, is the description 
of the various relationships within the real 
physical and spiritual worlds. | 

The mental occasion is derivative from its 
physical counterpart. It is also equally of the 
character of a perceptivity issuing into value- 
feeling, but it is a reflective perceptivity. 

There are two routes of creative passage 
from a physical occasion. One is towards 
another physical occasion, and the other is 
towards the derivative reflective occasion. 
The physical route links together physical 
occasions as successive temporal incidents in 
the life of a body. ‘The other route links 
this bodily life with a correlative mental life. 

[102] | 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


A mental occasion is an ultimate fact in the 
spiritual world, just as a physical occasion of 
blind perceptivity is an ultimate fact in the 
physical world. ‘There is an essential reference 
from one world to the other. 

There is no such thing as bare value. 
There is always a specific value, which is the 
created unit of feeling arising out of the 
specific mode of concretion of the diverse 
elements. These different specific value-feel- 
ings are comparable amid their differences; 
and the ground for this comparability is what 
is here termed ‘‘value.”’ 

This comparability grades the various oc- 
casions in respect to the intensiveness of 
value. The zero of intensiveness means the 
collapse of actuality. All intensive quantity 
is merely the contribution of some one ele- 
ment in the synthesis to this one intensiveness 
of value. 

Various occasions are thus comparable in 
respect to their relative depths of actuality. 
Occasions differ in importance of actuality. Thus 

[103] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


the purpose of God in the attainment of value 
is in a sense a creative purpose. Apart from 
God, the remaining formative elements would 
fail in their functions. There would be no 
creatures, since, apart from harmonious order, 
the perceptive fusion would be a confusion 
neutralizing achieved ‘feeling. Here “feeling” 
is used as a synonym for ‘ 

The adjustment is the reason for the world. 


“actuality.” 


It is not the case that there is an actual 
world which accidentally happens to exhibit 
an order of nature. There is an actual world 
because there is an order in nature. If there 
were no order, there would be no world. Also 
since there is a world, we know that there is 
an order. ‘The ordering entity is a necessary 
element in the metaphysical situation pre- 
sented by the actual world. 

This line of thought extends Kant’s argu- 
ment. He saw the necessity for God in the 
moral order. But with his metaphysics he 
rejected the argument from the cosmos. ‘The 
metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds 

[104] 


fF 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


the foundations of the world in the esthetic 
experience, rather than—as ‘with Kant—in 
the cognitive and conceptive experience. All 
order is therefore esthetic order, and the 
moral order is merely certain aspects of es- 
thetic order. The actual world is the outcome 
of the aesthetic order, and the esthetic order 
is derived from the immanence of God. 


VI. BODY AND MIND 


Descartes grounded his philosophy on an 
entirely different metaphysical description of 
the actual world. He started with cogitating 
minds, and with extended bodies which are 
the organic and inorganic bits of matter. 

Now in some sense no one doubts but that 
there are bodies and minds. The only point 
at issue is the status of such bodies and minds 
in the scheme of things. Descartes affirmed 
that they were individual substances, so that 
each bit of matter is a substance, and each 
mind is a substance. He also states what he 
means by a substance. He says: 

[105] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


And when we conceive of substance, we 
merely conceive an existent thing which 
requires nothing but itself in order to 
exist. ‘To speak truth, nothing but God 
answers to this description as being that 
which is absolutely self-sustaining, for we 
perceive that there is no other created 
thing which can exist without being 
sustained by his power... . 

Created substances, however, whether 
corporeal or thinking, may be conceived 
under this common concept; for they are 
things which need only the concurrence 
of God in order to exist. ... When we 
perceive any attribute, we therefore con- 
clude that some existing thing or sub- 
stance to which it may be attributed, is 
necessarily present.® 


These sentences are a summary of the pre- 
supposition of scientific thought in recent 
centuries: that the world is composed of bits 
of stuff with attributes. There are insuperable 


8Principles of Philosophy, LI and LII. Translated by Haldane and Ross. 
[ 106] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


difficulties in Descartes’ view which have led 
to attempts at simplification, keeping his 
general supposition of stuff with attributes. 

Note that Descartes presupposes three types 
of substance—namely, God, bits of matter, 
minds. Descartes’ proof of the existence of 
God is accepted by very few philosophers, 
religious or otherwise. Indeed, given his 
starting point, it is difficult to see how any 
proof can be found. 

The simplifications all concern dropping 
either one or two of these types of substances. 
For example, dropping God, and retaining 
only matter and mind; or dropping God and 
minds, and retaining the matter, as with 
Hobbes; or dropping matter, and retaining 
God and minds, as with Berkeley; or dropping 
matter and minds, and retaining God alone. 
In this latter case, the temporal world be- 
comes an appearance forming an attribute 
of God. 

But the main point of all such philosophies 
is that they presuppose individual substance, 

[107] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


either one or many individual substances, 
“which requires nothing but itself in order to 


exist.”’ 


This presupposition is exactly what is 
denied in the more Platonic description which 
has been given in this lecture. There is no 
entity, not even God, “‘which requires nothing 
but itself in order to exist.” | 

According to the doctrine of this lecture, 
every entity is in its essence social and re- 
quires the society in order to exist. In fact, 
the society for each entity, actual or ideal, is 
the all inclusive universe, including its ideal 
forms. 

But Descartes has the great merit that he 
states facts which any philosophy must fit 
into its scheme. ‘There are bits of matter, and 
there are minds. Both matter and mind have 
to be fitted into the metaphysical scheme. 

Now, according to the doctrine of this 
lecture, the most individual actual entity is a 
definite act of perceptivity. So matter and 
mind, which persist through a route of such 
occasions, must be relatively abstract; and 
[108] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


they must gain their specific individualities 
from their respective routes. The character of 
a bit of matter must be something common 
to each occasion of its route; and analogously, 
the character of a mind must be something 
common to each occasion of its route. Each 
bit of matter, and each mind, is a subordinate 
community—in that sense analogous to the 
actual world. 

But each occasion, in its character of being 
a finished creature, is a value of some definite 
specific sort. Thus a mind must be a route 
whose various occasions exhibit some com- 
munity of type of value. Similarly a bit of 
matter—or an electron—must be a route 
whose various occasions exhibit some com- 
munity of type of value. 

Again in such a route—material or mental— 
the environment will also partially determine the 
forms of the occasions. But that which the oc- 
casions have in common, so as to form a route 
of mind or a route of matter, must be derived 
by inheritance from“the antecedent members 

[109] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


of the route. The environment may favour 
this inheritance or may obstruct it. But such 
influence must be in the background so that 
there is a real transmission of the common 
element along the route. 

In the case of men and animals, there are 
obviously routes of mind and routes of matter 
in the very closest connection, which we will 
consider more particularly in a moment. In 
the case of a bit of inorganic matter, any 
associate route of mentality seems to be 
negligible. 

A belief in purely spiritual beings means, on 
this metaphysical theory, that there are routes 
of mentality in respect to which associate 
material routes are negligible, or entirely 
absent. At the present moment the orthodox 
belief is that for all men after death there are 
such routes, and that for all animals after 
death there are no such routes. 

Also at present it is generally held that a 
purely spiritual being is necessarily immortal. 
The doctrine here developed gives no warrant 

[110] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


for such a belief. It is entirely neutral on the 
question of immortality, or on the existence 
of purely spiritual beings other than God. 
There is no reason why such a question should 
not be decided on more special evidence, 
religious or otherwise, provided that it is 
trustworthy. In this lecture we are merely 
considering evidence with a certain breadth of 
extension throughout mankind. Until that 
evidence has yielded its systematic theory, 
special evidence is indefinitely weakened in its 
effect. 


VII. THE CREATIVE PROCESS 


This account of what is meant by the en- 
during existence of matter and of mind 
explains such endurance as exemplifying the 
order immanent in the world. The solid 
earth survives because there is an order laid 
upon the creativity in virtue of which second 
after second, minute after minute, hour after 
hour, day after day, year after year, century 
after century, age after age, the creative 


[111] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


energy finds in the maintenance of that com- 
plex form a centre of experienced perceptivity 
focusing the universe into one unity. 

It survives because the universe is a process 
of attaining instances of definite experience 
out of its own elements. Each such instance 
embraces the whole, omitting nothing, whether 
it be ideal form or actual fact. But it brings 
them into its own unity of feeling under 
gradations of relevance and of irrelevance, 
and thereby by this limitation issues into 
that definite experience which it is. 

Accordingly, any given instance of experi- 
ence is only possible so far as the antecedent 
facts permit. For they are required in order 
to constitute it. The maintenance, throughout 
ages of life history, of a given type of experi- 
ence, in instance after instance of its separate 
occasions, requires, therefore, the stable order 
of the actual world. 

The creative process is thus to be discerned 
in that transition by which one occasion, 
already actual, enters into the birth of another 

[112] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


instance of experienced value. There is not 
one simple line of transition from occasion to 
occasion, though there may be a dominant 
line. The whole world conspires to produce a 
new creation. It presents to the creative proc- 
ess its opportunities and its limitations. 

The limitations are the opportunities. The 
essence of depth of actuality—that is of vivid 
experience—is definiteness. Now to be definite 
always means that all the elements of a com- 
plex whole contribute to some one effect, to 
the exclusion of others. The creative process 
is a process of exclusion to the same extent 
as it is a process of inclusion. In this connec- 
tion “‘to exclude’? means to relegate to irrele- 
vance in the esthetic unity, and “to include” 
means to elicit relevance to that unity. 

The birth of a new instance is the passage 
into novelty. Consider how any one actual 
fact, which I will call the ground, can enter 
into the creative process. The novelty which 
enters into the derivate instance is the in- 
formation of the actual world with a new 

[113] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


set of ideal forms. In the most literal sense 
the lapse of time is the renovation of the 
world with ideas. A great philosopher*® has 
said that time is the mind of space. In 
respect to one particular new birth of one 
centre of experience, this novelty of ideal 
forms will be called the ‘“‘consequent.” Thus 
we are now considering the particular rele- 
vance of the consequent to the particular 
ground supplied by one antecedent occasion. 

The derivate includes the fusion of the 
particular ground with the consequent, so far 
as the consequent is graded by its relevance 
to that ground. 

In this fusion of ground with consequent, 
the creative process brings together something 
which is actual and something which, at its 
entry into that process, is not actual. The 
process is the achievement of actuality by the 
ideal consequent, in virtue of its union with 
the actual ground. In the phrase of Aristotle, 
the process is the fusion of being with not- 
being. 

$Cf, Alexander, Mind, Space, and Deity, Vol. II, p. 43, et passim. 

[114] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


The birth of a new esthetic experience 
depends on the maintenance of two principles 
by the creative purpose: 

1. The novel consequent must be 
graded in relevance so as to preserve 
some identity of character with the 
ground. 

2. The novel consequent must be 
graded in relevance so as to preserve 
some contrast with the ground in respect 
to that same identity of character. 

These two principles are derived from the 
doctrine that an actual fact is a fact of 
gesthetic experience. All esthetic experience 
is feeling arising out of the realization of 
contrast under identity. 

Thus the consequent must agree with the 
ground in general type so as to preserve defi- 
niteness, but it must contrast with it in 
respect to contrary instances so as to obtain 
vividness and quality. In the physical world, 
this principle of contrast under an identity 
expresses itself in the physical law that vibra- 
tion enters into the ultimate nature of atomic 


[115] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


organisms. Vibration is the recurrence of 
contrast within identity of type. The whole 
possibility of measurement in the physical 
world depends on this principle. To measure 
is to count vibrations. 

Thus physical quantities are aggregates of 
physical vibrations, .and physical vibrations 
are the expression among the abstractions of 
physical science of the fundamental principle 
of esthetic experience. 

Another example of this same principle is to 
be found in the connection between body and 
mind. Both mind and body refer to their 
life-history of separate concrete occasions. So 
the connection which we seek is to be found 
in the creative process relating a physical 
occasion, in the life of the body, to its corre~ 
sponding mental occasion in the life of the 
mind. | 

The physical occasion enters into the mental 
occasion, as already actual, and as contrib- 
uting to its ground. ‘The reversion from its 
ground, which the consequent of ideal novelty 

[116] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


must exhibit, is now of the most fundamental 
character. ‘The reversion is the undoing of 
the synthesis exhibited in the ground. Thus 
the transition from bodily occasion to mental 
occasion exhibits a new dimension of transi- 
tion from that exhibited in the transition from 
bodily occasion to bodily occasion. In the 
latter transition there is the novelty of 
contrast within the one concept of synthesis. 
In the former, the contrast is the contrast 
of synthesis itself with its opposite, which is 
analysis. 

Thus in the birth of the mental occasion 
the consequent of ideal novelty enters into 
reality, and possesses an analytic foree over 
against the synthetic ground. Ideal forms 
thus synthesized into a mental occasion are 
termed concepts. Concepts meet blind experi- 
ence with an analytic force. Their synthesis 
with physical occasion, as ground, is the per- 
ceptive analysis of the blind physical occasion 
in respect to its degree of relevance to the 
concepts. 


[117] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


The phrase “immediate experience” can have 
either of two meanings, according as it refers 
to the physical or to the mental occasion. It 
may mean a complete concretion of physical 
relationships in the unity of a blind percep- 
tivity. In this sense “immediate experience” 
means an ultimate physical fact. But in a 
secondary, and more usual, sense it means the 
consciousness of physical experience. Such con- 
sciousness is a mental occasion. It has the 
character of being an analysis of physical expe- 
rience by synthesis with the concepts involved 
in the mentality. Such analysis is incomplete, 
because it is dependent on the limitations of 
the concepts. This limitation arises from the 
grading of the relevance of the concepts in the 
mental occasion. The most complete concrete 
fact is dipolar, physical and mental. But, for 
some specific purpose, the proportion of impor- 
tance, as shared between the two poles, may 
vary from negligibility to dominance of either 
pole. - 

The value realized in the mental occasion is 


[118] 


BODY AND SPIRIT 


knowledge-value. This knowledge-value is the 
issue of the full character of the creativity 
into the creature world. There is nothing in 
the creativity which fails to issue into the 
actual world. Thus the creativity with a pur- 
pose issues into the mental creature conscious 
of an ideal. Also God, as conditioning the 
creativity with his harmony of apprehension, 
issues into the mental creature as moral judg- 
ment according to a perfection of ideals. 

The order of the world is no accident. 
There is nothing actual which could be actual 
without some measure of order. The religious 
insight is the grasp of this truth: That the 
order of the world, the depth of reality of the 
world, the value of the world in its whole and 
in its parts, the beauty of the world, the zest 
of life, the peace of life, and the mastery of 
evil, are all bound together—not accidentally, 
but by reason of this truth: that the universe 
exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and 
a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; 
but that this creativity and these forms are 


[119] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


together impotent to achieve actuality apart 
from the completed ideal harmony, which is 


God. 


[120] 


IV 
TRUTH AND CRITICISM 





CHAPTER IV 
TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


I. THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA 


In human nature there is no such separate 
function as a special religious sense. In mak- 
ing this assertion, | am agreeing with the 
following quotation: 

Those who tend to identify religious 
experience with the activity of some 
peculiar organ or element of the mental 
life have recently made much of the sub- 
conscious. Here there seems to be a safe 
retreat for the hard-pressed advocates of 
the uniqueness of religious experience.? 

Religious truth must be developed from 
knowledge acquired when our ordinary senses 
and intellectual operations are at their highest 
pitch of discipline. To move one step from 
this position towards the dark recesses of 


1Cf. Prof. E. S. Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience, p. 291. 
[123] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


abnormal psychology is to surrender finally 
any hope of a solid foundation for religious 
doctrine. 

Religion starts from the generalization of 
final truths first perceived as exemplified in 
particular instances. ‘These truths are ampli- 
fied into a coherent system and applied to the 
interpretation of life. They stand or fall— 
like other truths—by their success in this in- 
terpretation. ‘The peculiar character of reli- 
gious truth is that it explicitly deals with 
values. It brings into our consciousness that 
permanent side of the universe which we can 
care for. It thereby provides a meaning, in 
terms of value, for our own existence, a mean- 
ing which flows from the nature of things. 

It is not true, however, that we observe 
best when we are entirely devoid of emotion. 
Unless there is a direction of interest, we do 
not observe at all. Further, our capacity for 
observation is limited. Accordingly, when we 
are observing some things, we are in a bad 
position for observing other things. 

[124] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


Thus there are certain emotional states 
which are most favourable for a peculiar con- 
centration on topics of religious interest, just 
as other states facilitate the apprehension of 
arithmetical truths. Also, emotional states are 
related to states of the body. Most people are 
more likely to make arithmetical slips when 
they are tired in the evening. But we still 
believe that arithmetic holds good-from sun- 
down to cockcrow. 

Again, it is not true that all people are on a 
level in respect to their perceptive powers. 
Some people appear to realize continuously, 
and at a higher level, types of emotional and 
perceptive experience, which we_ recognize 
as corresponding to those periods of our own 
lives most worthy of confidence for that sort 
of experience. In so far as what they say 
interprets our own best moments, it is reason- 
able to trust to the evidential force of their 
experience. 

These considerations are all commonplaces, 
but it is necessary to keep them clearly in 

[125] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


mind when we endeavour to form our philos- 
ophy of religious knowledge. 

A dogma is the precise enunciation of a gen- 
eral truth, divested so far as possible from 
particular exemplification. Such precise ex- 
pression is in the long run a condition for 
vivid realization, for effectiveness, for appre- 
hension of width of scope, and for survival. 

For example, when the Greeks, such as 
Pythagoras or Euclid, formulated accurately 
mathematical dogmas, the general truths 
which the Egyptians had acted upon for more 
than thirty generations became thereby of 
greater importance. 

It is not the case, however, that our ap- 
prehension of a general truth is dependent 
upon its accurate verbal expression. For it 
would follow that we could never be dissatis- 
fied with the verbal expression of something 
that we had never apprehended. But this 
consciousness of failure to express our accurate 
meaning must have haunted most of us. 

For example, the notion of irrational num- 

[126] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


ber had been used in mathematics for over 
two thousand years before it received accurate 
definition in the last quarter of the nine- 
teenth century. Also, Newton and Leibnitz 
introduced the differential calculus, which was 
the foundation of modern mathematical phys- 
ics. But the mathematical notions involved 
did not receive adequate verbal expression for 
two hundred and fifty years. 

Such recondite examples are quite unneces- 
sary. We know more of the characters of 
those who are dear to us than we can express 
accurately in words. We may recognize the 
truth of some statement about them. It will 
be a new statement about something which 
we had already apprehended but had never 
formulated. 

This example brings out another fact: that 
a one-sided formulation may be true, but may 
have the effect of a lie by its distortion of 
emphasis. Such distortion does not stand in 
its character of a truth, but depends upon 
those who are affected by it. So far as the 

[127] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


make-up of an individual mind is concerned, 
there is a proportion in truth as well as in art. 

Thus an ill-balanced zeal for the propaga- 
tion of dogma bears witness to a certain 
coarseness of aesthetic sensitiveness. It shows 
a strain of indifference—due perhaps to arro- 
gance, perhaps to rashness, perhaps to mere 
ignorance—a strain of indifference to the fact 
that others may require a proportion of formu- 
lation different from that suitable for our- 


selves. Perhaps our pet dogmas require 


correction: they may even be wrong. 

The fate of a word has to the historian the 
value of a document. The modern unfavour- 
able implications of the kindred words, dogma, 
dogmatic, dogmatist, tell the story of some 
failure in habits of thought. The word 
“dogma” originally means an “opinion,” and 
thence more especially a “philosophic opinion.” 
Thus, for example, the Greek physician, Galen, 
uses the phrase “dogmatic physicians’ to 
mean “physicians who guide themselves by 
general principles’—surely a praiseworthy 

[128] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


practice. The nearest Greek dictionary will 
give this elementary information. But the 
dictionary—and this is why I have quoted it— 
gives an ominous addition to the information 
about Galen. It says that Galen contrasts 
“dogmatic physicians” with “empiric physi- 
cians.” If you then refer to the word “em- 
piric,” you will find that “empiric physicians” 
contended that “experience was the one thing 
needful.” In this lecture we have to investi- 
gate the application to religion of this contrast 
between “dogmatic” and ‘‘empiric.” 

The philosophy of expression is only now 
receiving its proper attention.2 In the fram- 
ing of dogmas it is only possible to use ideas 
which have received a distinct, well-recognized 
signification. Also, no idea is determinate in a 
vacuum: It has its being as one of a system 
of ideas. A dogma is the expression of a fact 
as it appears within a certain sphere of 
thought. You cannot convey a dogma by 


2Cf. Symbolism and Truth, by R. M. Eaton, Assistant Professor in 
Harvard University. Harvard University Press, 1925. 


[129] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


merely translating the words; you must also 
understand the system of thought to which 
it is relevant. ‘To take a very obvious ex- 
ample, “The Fatherhood of God’ is a phrase 
which would have a significance for a Roman 
citizen of the early Republic different from 
that which it has for a modern American— 
stern for the one, tender for the other. 

In estimating the validity of a dogma, it 
must be projected against the alternatives to 
it within that sphere of thought. You cannot 
claim absolute finality for a dogma without 
claiming a commensurate finality for the 
sphere of thought within which it arose. If 
the dogmas of the Christian Church from the 
second to the sixth centuries express finally 
and sufficiently the truths concerning the topics 
about which they deal, then the Greek phi- 
losophy of that period had developed a system 
of ideas of equal finality. You cannot limit 
the inspiration to a narrow circle of creeds. 

A dogma—in the sense of a precise state- 
ment—can never be final; it can only be ade- 

[130] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


quate in its adjustment of certain abstract 
concepts. But the estimate of the status of 
these concepts remains for determination. 

You cannot rise above the adequacy of the 
terms you employ. A dogma may be true in 
the sense that it expresses such interrelations 
of the subject matter as are expressible within 
the set of ideas employed. But if the same 
dogma be used intolerantly so as to check the 
employment of other modes of analyzing the 
subject matter, then, for all its truth, it will be 
doing the work of a falsehood. 

Progress in truth—truth of science and 
truth of religion—is mainly a progress in the 
framing of concepts, in discarding artificial 
abstractions or partial metaphors, and in 
evolving notions which strike more deeply into 
the root of reality. 


Il, EXPERIENCE AND EXPRESSION 


Expression is the one fundamental sacra- 
ment. It is the outward and visible sign of 
an inward and spiritual grace. It follows that, 

[131] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


in the process of forming a common expression 
of direct intuition, there is first a stage of 
primary expression into some medium of sense- 
experience which each individual contributes 
at first hand. No one can do this for another. 
It is the contribution of each to the knowledge 
of all. 

This primary expression mainly clothes 
itself in the media of action and of words, but 
also partly of art. ‘Their expressiveness to 
others arises from the fact that they are inter- 
pretable in terms of the intuitions of the 
recipients. Apart from such interpretation, 
the modes of expression remain accidental, 
unrationalized happenings of mere sense-experi- 
ence; but with such interpretation, the recip- 
ient extends his apprehension of the ordered 
universe by penetrating into the inward nature 
of the originator of the expression. There is 
then a community of intuition by reason of 
the sacrament of expression proffered by one 
and received by the other. 

But the expressive sign is more than inter- 

[132] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


pretable. It is creative. It elicits the intui- 
tion which interprets it. It cannot elicit what 
is not there. A note on a tuning fork can 
elicit a response from a piano. But the piano 
has already in it the string tuned to the same 
note. In the same way the expressive sign 
elicits the existent intuition which would not 
otherwise emerge into individual distinctive- 
ness. Again in theological language, the sign 
works ex opere operato, but only within the 
limitation that the recipient be patient of the 
creative action. 

There is very little really first-hand expres- 
sion in the world. By this I mean that most 
expression is what may be termed responsive 
expression, namely, expression which expresses 
intuitions elicited by the expressions of others. 
This is as it should be; since in this way what 
is permanent, important, and widely spread, 
receives more and more a clear definition. 

But there is need for something more than 
this responsive expression. For it is not true 
that there is easy apprehension of the great 

[133] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


formative generalities. They are embedded 
under the rubbish of irrelevant detail. Men 
knew a lot about dogs before they thought of 
backbones and of vertebrates. The great intui- 
tions, which in their respective provinces set all 
things right, dawn but slowly upon history. 

With this prevalence of responsive expres- 
sion, we are used to a learned literature and to 
imitative conduct. When we get anything 
which is neither learned nor imitative, it is 
often very evil. But sometimes it is genius. 

The history of culture shows that originality 
of expression is not a process of continuous 
development. There are antecedent periods 
of slow evolution. Finally, as if touched by a 
spark, a very few persons, one, two, or three, 
in some particular province of experience, ex- 
press completely novel intuitions. Such intui- 
tions can be responded to, analyzed in terms 
of their relationships to other ideas, fused with 
other forms of experience, but as individual 
primary intuitions within their own province 
of experience they are not surpassed. 

[134] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


The world will not repeat Dante, Shake- 
speare, Socrates, or the Greek tragedians. 
These men, in connection with the tiny groups 
forming their immediate environments of as- 
sociates and successors and perhaps of equals, 
add something once and for all. We develop 
in connection with them, but not beyond 
them, in respect to those definite intuitions 
which they flashed upon the world. These 
examples are taken from the circle of litera- 
ture merely for the sake of easy intelligibility. 

There are two points to be noticed about 
them. In the first place, they are associated 
with a small stage fitted for their peculiar 
originality. Standardized size can do almost 
anything, except foster the growth of genius. 
That is the privilege of the tiny oasis. Goethe 
surveyed the world, but it was from Weimar; 
Shakespeare is universal, but he lived in 
Elizabethan England. We cannot think of 
Socrates outside Athens. 

The second characteristic is that their pecu- 
liar originality is the very element in their 

[135] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


expression which remains unformularized. They 
deal with what all men know, and they make 
it new. They do not bring to the world a 
new formula nor do they discover new facts, 
but in expressing their apprehensions of the 
world, they leave behind them an element of 
novelty—a new expression forever evoking its 
proper response. 

Some original men do express themselves 
in formule: but the formula then expresses 
something beyond itself. The formula is then 
secondary to its meaning; it is, in a sense, a 
literary device. The formula sinks in impor- 
tance, or even is abandoned; but its meaning 
remains fructifying in the world, finding new 
expression to suit new circumstances. ‘The 
formula was not wrong, but it was limited to 
its own sphere of thought. 

In particular, the view that there are a few 
fundamental dogmas is arbitrary. Every true 
dogma which formulates with some adequacy 
the facts of a complex religious experience is 
fundamental for the individual in question 

[136] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


and he disregards it at his peril. For formula- 
tion increases vividness of apprehension, and 
the peril is the loss of an aid in the difh- 
cult task of spiritual ascent. 

But every individual suffers from invincible 
ignorance; and a dogma which fails to evoke 
any response in immediate apprehension stifles 
the religious life. There is no mechanical rule 
and no escape from the necessity of complete 
sincerity either way. 

Thus religion is primarily individual, and 
the dogmas of religion are clarifying modes 
of external expression. The intolerant use of 
religious dogmas has practically destroyed 
their utility for a great, if not the greater part, 
of the civilized world. 

Expression, and in particular expression by 
dogma, is the return from solitariness to 
society. ‘There is no such thing as absolute 
solitariness. Each entity requires its environ- 
ment. ‘Thus man cannot seclude himself from 
society. 

Even for individual intuitions outward ex- 

[137] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


pression is necessary, as a sacrament in which 
the minister and recipient are one. But fur- 
ther, what is known in secret must be enjoyed 
in common, and must be verified in common. 
The immediate conviction of the moment in 
this way justifies itself as a rational principle 
enlightening the objective world. 

The great instantaneous conviction in this 
way becomes the Gospel, the good news. It 
insists on its universality, because it is either 
that or a passing fancy. ‘The conversion of 
the Gentiles is both the effect of truth and the 
test of truth. 

Thus the simplicity of inspiration has passed 
from its first expression into responsive experi- 
ence. It then disengages itself from particular 
experience by formulation in precise dogmas, 
and so faces the transformations of history. 

In this passage a religion coalesces with 
other factors in human life. It is expanded, 
explained, modified, adapted. If it was origi- 
nally founded upon truth, it maintains its 
identity by its recurrence to the inspired sim- 

[138] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


plicity of its origin. ‘The dogmas are state- 
ments of how the complex world is to be 
expressed in the light of the intuitions funda- 
mental to the religion. They are not neces- 
sarily simple in character or limited in 
number. 


III. THE THREE TRADITIONS 


The divergence in the expression of dogmas 
is most clearly shown in the two traditions of 
Buddhism and Christianity. This divergence 
is important because it reaches down to the 
most fundamental religious concepts, namely, 
the nature of God, and the aim of life. 

There are close analogies between the two 
religions. In both there is, in some sense, a 
saviour—Christ in the one, and the Buddha 
in the other. But their functions differ, ac- 
cording to the theologies of the two religions. 
In both, the souls of the blessed return to 
God. Again, this analogy cloaks a wide diver- 
gence; for the respective concepts of God, and 
the respective concepts of the meaning of the 

[139] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


return of the soul, differ in both cases. 

The moral codes have striking analogies. 
But again there are divergencies which flow 
naturally from the theological differences. To 
put it briefly, Buddhism, on the whole, dis- 
courages the sense of active personality, 
whereas Christianity encourages it. For ex- 
ample, modern European philosophy, which 
had its origin in Plato and Aristotle, after 
sixteen hundred years of Christianity reformu- 
lated its problems with increased attention to 
the importance of the individual subject of 
experience, conceived as an abiding entity 
with a transition of experiences. If Europe, 
after the Greek period, had been subject to 
the Buddhist religion, the change of philosoph- 
ical climate would have been in the other 
direction. 

This reformation of philosophy has empha- 
sized the divergence. For the.abiding individ- 
ual substance, mind or matter, is now 
conceived as the subject supporting the transi- 
tion of experiences. Thus, according to preva- 

[140] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


lent Western notions, the moral aims of 
Buddhism are directed to altering the first 
principles of metaphysics. 

The absolute idealism, so influential in 
Europe and America during the last third of 
the nineteenth century, and still powerful 
notwithstanding the reaction from it, was un- 
doubtedly a reaction towards Buddhistic meta- | 
physics on the part of the Western mentality. 
The multiplicity of finite enduring individuals 
were relegated to a world of appearances, 
and the ultimate reality was centred in an 
Absolute. 

But meanwhile science had appeared as a 
third organized system of thought which in 
many respects played the part of a theology, 
by reason of the answers which it gave to 
current theological questions. Science sug-| 
gested a cosmology; and whatever suggests a 
cosmology, suggests a religion. 

From its very beginning in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, science emphasized 
ideas which modified the religious picture of 

[141] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


the world. As the medieval picture dissolved, 
religion and philosophy equally received shock 
after shock, with a final culmination in the 
middle of the nineteenth century. 

Philosophy, by its nature, was less wedded 
to its aboriginal picture of the world than was 
religion. Accordingly it divided itself into two 
streams of thought. One stream subordinated 
itself entirely to science, and has asserted its 
mission to be the discussion of the proper co- 
ordination of notions employed in current 
scientific practice. ‘The other stream, which 
is that of absolute idealism, side-tracked 
science by proclaiming that science dealt with 
finite truths respecting a world of appearances; 
and that these appearances were not very real, 
and that these truths were not very true. It 
reserved for philosophy the determination of 
all that was to be known concerning the 
ultimate reality, and concerning our own partic- 
ipation in that final absolute fact. 

The importance of rational religion in the 
history of modern culture is that it stands or 

[142] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM — 


falls with its fundamental position, that we 
know more than can be formulated in one 
finite systematized scheme of abstractions, 
however important that scheme may be in the 
elucidation of some aspect of the order of 
things. 

The final principle of religion is that there is 
a wisdom in the nature of things, from which 
flow our direction of practice, and our pos- 
sibility of the theoretical analysis of fact. It 
grounds this principle upon two sources of 
evidence, first upon our. success in various 
special theoretical sciences, physical and other- 
wise; and secondly, upon our knowledge of a 
discernment of ordered relationships, especially 
in esthetic valuations, which stretches far 
beyond anything which has been expressed 
systematically in words. 

According to religion, this discernment of 
relationships forms in itself the very substance 
of existence. The formulations are the froth 
upon the surface. Religion insists that the 
world is a mutually adjusted disposition of 

[143] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


things, issuing in value for its own sake. This 
is the very point that science is always for- 
getting. 

Religions commit suicide when they find 
their inspirations in their dogmas. ‘The inspi- 
ration of religion lies in the history of religion. 
By this I mean that it is to be found in the 
primary expressions of the intuitions of the 
finest types of religious lives. The sources of 
religious belief are always growing, though some 
supreme expressions may lie in the past. Rec- 
ords of these sources are not formule. They 
elicit in us intuitive response which pierces 
beyond dogma. 

But dogmatic expression is necessary. For 
whatever has objective validity is capable of 
partial expression in terms of abstract con- 
cepts, so that a coherent doctrine arises which 
elucidates the world beyond the locus of the 
origin of the dogmas in question. 

Also exact statements are the media by 
which identical intuitions into the world can 
be identified amid a wide variety of circum- 
stances. 

[144] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


But the dogmas, however true, are only 
bits of the truth, expressed in terms which in 
some ways are over-assertive and in other 
ways lose the essence of truth. When exactly 
understood in relation to an exact system of 
philosophic thought, they may—or may not— 
be exactly true. 

But in respect to this exact truth, they are 
very abstract—much more abstract than the 
representations of them in popular thought. 
Also in fact, there never has been any exact, 
complete system of philosophic thought, and 
there never has been any exact understanding 
of dogmas, an understanding which has been 
properly confined to strict interpretation in 
terms of a philosophic system, complete or 
incomplete. 

Accordingly, though dogmas have their 
measure of truth, which is unalterable, in 
their precise forms they are narrow, limitative, 
and alterable: in effect untrue, when carried 
over beyond the proper scope of their utility. 

A system of dogmas may be the ark within 

[145] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


which the Church floats safely down the 
flood-tide of history. But the Church will 
perish unless it opens its window and lets out 
the dove to search for an olive branch.’ Some- 
times even it will do well to disembark on 
Mount Ararat and build a new altar to the 
divine Spirit—an altar neither in Mount 
Gerizim nor yet at Jerusalem. 

The decay of Christianity and Buddhism, 
as determinative influences in modern thought, 
is partly due to the fact that each religion has 
unduly sheltered itself from the other. The 
self-sufficient pedantry of learning and the 
confidence of ignorant zealots have combined 
to shut up each religion in its own forms of — 
thought. Instead of looking to each other for 
deeper meanings, they have remained self- 
satisfied and unfertilized. 

Both have suffered from the rise of the 
third tradition, which is science, because 
neither of them had retained the requisite 
flexibility of adaptation. Thus the real, prac- 
tical problems of religion have never been 

[146] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


adequately studied in the only way in which 
such problems can be studied, namely, in the 
school of experience. 

One most obvious problem is how to save 
the intermediate imaginative representations 
of spiritual truths from loss of effectiveness, 
if the possibility of modifications of dogma are 
admitted. ‘The religious spirit is not identical 
with dialectical acuteness. ‘Thus these inter- 
mediate representations play a great part in 
religious life. They are enshrined in modes of 
worship, in popular religious literature, and in 
art. Religions cannot do without them; but 
if they are allowed to dominate, uncriticised 
by dogma or by recurrence to the primary 
sources of religious inspiration, they are prop- 
erly to be termed idols. In Christian history, 
the charge of idolatry has been bandied to and 
fro among rival theologians. Probably, if 
taken in its wide sense, it rests with equal 
truth on all the main churches, Protestant and 
Catholic. Idolatry is the necessary product. 
of static dogmas. 

[147] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


But the problem of so handling popular 
forms of thought as to keep their full reference 
to the primary sources, and yet also to keep 
them in touch with the best critical dogmas of 
their times, is no easy one. The chief figures 
in the history of the Christian Church who 
seem to have grasped explicitly its central 
importance were, Origen in the Church of 
Alexandria, in the early part of the third 
century, and Erasmus in the early part of the 
sixteenth century. Their analogous fates show 
the wavering attitude of the Christian Church, 
culminating in lapses into dogmatic idolatry. 
It must, however, be assigned to the great 
credit of the Papacy of his time, that Eras- 
mus never in his lifetime lost the support of the 
courtof Rome.? Unfortunately Erasmus, though 
a good man, was no hero, and the moral atmos- 
phere of the Renaissance Papacy was not 
equal to its philosophic insight. In the phrase 
of Leo X, the quarrel of monks began; and 
yet another golden opportunity was lost, 


sF rasmus received the offer of a Cardinalate in 1534, and died in 1536, 
his works have since been placed on the Index. 


[148] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


while rival pedants cut out neat little dog- 
matic systems to serve as the unalterable 
measure of the Universe. 


IV. THE NATURE OF GOD 


The general history of religious thought, of 
which the Reformation period is a particular 
instance, is that of the endeavour of mankind 
to interpret the great standard experiences as 
leading to a more definite knowledge than can 
be derived from a metaphysic which founds 
itself upon general experience. 

There can be nothing inherently illegitimate 
in such an attempt. But if we attend to the 
general principles which regulate all endeav- 
ours after clear statement of truth, we must 
be prepared to amplify, recast, generalize, and 
adapt, so as to absorb into one system all 
sources of experience. 

The earlier statements will be not so much 
wrong, as obscured by trivial limitations, and 
as thereby implying an exclusion of comple- 
mentary truths. The growth will be in the 
proportion of truth. 

[149] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


The doctrines—fundamental to religion—of 
the nature of God must be construed in this 
sense. It is in respect to this doctrine that 
the great cleavages of religious thought arise. 
The extremes are the doctrine of God as 
the impersonal order: of the universe, and the 
doctrine of God as the one person creating 
the universe. 

A general concept has to be construed in 
terms of a descriptive metaphysical system. 
In this concluding section of this course, we 
ask what can be said of the nature of God in 
terms of the metaphysical description which 
has been adopted as the basis of thought in 
this course of lectures, and which was more 
particularly described in the previous lecture. 

To be an actual thing is to be limited. An 
actual thing is an elicited feeling-value, which 
is analyzable as the outcome of a graded 
grasping of the elements of the universe into 
the unity of one fact. This grasping together 
may be called a perception. The grading 
means the grading of relevance of the various 

[150] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


elements, so far as concerns their contribution 
to the one actual fact. 

The synthesis is the union of what is al- 
ready actual with what is, for that occasion, 
new for realization. I have called it the union 
of the actual ground with the novel conse- 
quent. The ground is formed by all the facts 
of the world, already actual and graded in 
their proportion of relevance. The consequent 
is constituted by all the ideal forms of pos- 
sibility, graded in their proportion. The 
grading of the actual ground arises from the 
creativity of some actual fact passing over 
into a new form by reason of the fact itself. 
The new creativity, under consideration, has 
thus already a definite status in the world, 
arising from its particular origin. We can 
indifferently say that the grading arises from 
the status, or the status from the grading. 
They are different ways of saying the same 
thing. 

The grading of the ideal forms arises from 
the grading of the actual facts. It is the 

[151] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


union of the forms with the facts in such 
measure as to elicit a renewed feeling-value, 
of the type possible as a novel outcome from 
the antecedent facts. 

Depth of value is only possible if the ante- 
cedent facts conspire in unison. Thus a meas- 
ure of harmony in the ground is requisite for 
the perpetuation of depth into the future. 
But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of 
limitation is essential for growth of reality. 

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity 
can procure nothing. The limitation, and the 
basis arising from what is already actual, are 
both of them necessary and interconnected. 

Thus the whole process itself, viewed at 
any stage as a definite limited fact which has 
issued from the creativity, requires a definite 
entity, already actual among the formative 
elements, as an antecedent ground for the 
entry of the ideal forms into the definite proc- 
ess of the temporal world. 

But such a complete aboriginal actuality 
must differ from actuality in process of reali- 

[152] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


zation in respect to the blind occasions of 
perceptivity which issue from process and 
require process. ‘These occasions build up 
the physical world which is essentially in 
transition. 

God, who is the ground antecedent to 
transition, must include all possibilities of 
physical value conceptually, thereby holding 
the ideal forms apart in equal, conceptual 
realization of knowledge. Thus, as concepts, 
they are grasped together in the synthesis of 
omniscience. 

The limitation of God is his goodness. He 
gains his depth of actuality by his harmony of 
valuation. It is not true that God is in all 
respects infinite. If He were, He would be. 
evil as well as good. Also this unlimited fu- 
sion of evil with good would mean mere 
nothingness. He is something decided and is 
thereby limited. 

He is complete in the sense that his vision 
determines every possibility of value. Such 
a complete vision coordinates and adjusts 

[153] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING: 


every detail. Thus his knowledge of the re- 
lationships of particular modes of value is not 
added to, or disturbed, by the realization in 
the actual world of what is already concept- 
ually realized in his ideal world. This ideal 
world of conceptual harmonization is merely 
a description of God himself. Thus the nature 
of God is the complete conceptual realization 
of the realm of ideal forms. The kingdom of 
heaven is God. But these forms are not 
realized by him in mere bare isolation, but as 
elements in the value of his conceptual ex- 
perience. Also, the ideal forms are in God’s 
vision as contributing to his complete experi- 
ence, by reason of his conceptual realization 
of their possibilities as elements of value in 
any creature. ‘Thus God is the one system- 
atic, complete fact, which is the antecedent 
ground conditioning every creative act. 

The depths of his existence lie beyond the 
vulgarities of praise or of power. He gives to 
suffering its swift insight into values which 
can issue from it. He is the ideal companion 

[154] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


who transmutes what has been lost into a 
living fact within his own nature. He is the 
mirror which discloses to every creature its 
own greatness. 

The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation 
of good from evil. It is the overcoming of 
evil by good. This transmutation of evil into 
good enters into the actual world by reason 
of the inclusion of the nature of God, which 
includes the ideal vision of each actual evil so 
met with a novel consequent as to issue in the 
restoration of goodness. 

God has in his nature the knowledge of evil, 
of pain, and of degradation, but it is there as 
overcome with what is good. Every fact is 
what it is, a fact of pleasure, of joy, of pain, 
or of suffering. In its union with God that 
fact is not a total loss, but on its finer side is 
an element to be woven immortally into the 
rhythm of mortal things. Its very evil be- 
comes a stepping stone in the all-embracing 
ideals of God. 

Every event on its finer side introduces God 

[155] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


into the world. Through it his ideal vision is 
given a base in actual fact to which He 
provides the ideal consequent, as a factor 
saving the world from the self-destruction of 
evil. The power by which God sustains the 
world is the power of himself as the ideal. He 
adds himself to the actual ground from which 
every creative act takes its rise. The world 
lives by its incarnation of God in itself. 
_ He transcends the temporal world, because 
He is an actual fact in the nature of things. He 
is not there as derivative from the world; 
He is the actual fact from which the other 
formative elements cannot be torn apart. 
But equally it stands in his nature that He 
is the realization of the ideal conceptual 
harmony by reason of which there is an actual 
process in the total universe—an evolving 
world which is actual because there is order. 
The abstract forms are thus the link be- 
tween God and the actual world. These forms 
are abstract and not real, because in them- 
selves they represent no achievement of actual 
R [156] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


value. Actual fact always means fusion into 
one perceptivity. God is one such conceptual 
fusion, embracing the concept of all such 
possibilities graded in harmonious, relative 
subordination. Each actual occasion in the 
temporal world is another such fusion. ‘The 
forms belong no more to God than to any one 
occasion. Apart from these forms, no rational 
description can be given either of God or of 
the actual world. Apart from God, there 
would be no actual world; and apart from the 
actual world with its creativity, there would 
be no rational explanation of the ideal vision 
which constitutes God. 

Each actual occasion gives to the creativity 
which flows from it a definite character in two 
ways. In one way, as a fact, enjoying its 
complex of relationships with the rest of the 
world, it contributes a ground—partly good 
and partly bad—for the creativity to fuse with 
a novel consequent, which will be the outcome 
of its free urge. In another way, as trans- 
muted in the nature of God, the ideal conse- 

[157] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


quent as it stands in his vision is also added. 
Thus God in the world is the perpetual vision 
of the road which leads to the deeper realities. 


V. CONCLUSION 


God is that function in the world by reason 
of which our purposes are directed to ends 
which in our own consciousness are impartial 
as to our own interests. He is that element in 
life in virtue of which judgment stretches 
beyond facts of existence to values of ex- 
istence. He is that element in virtue of which 
our purposes extend beyond values for our- 
selves to values for others. He is that ele- 
ment in virtue of which the attainment of 
such a value for others transforms itself into 
value for ourselves. | 

He is the binding element in the world. 
The consciousness which is individual in us, is 
universal in him: the love which is partial in 
us is all-embracing in him. Apart from him 
there could be no world, because there could 
be no adjustment of individuality. His pur- 

[158] 


ST] 


TRUTH AND CRITICISM 


pose in the world is quality of attainment. 
His purpose is always embodied in the partic- 
ular ideals relevant to the actual state of the 
world. ‘Thus all attainment is immortal in 
that it fashions the actual ideals which are 
God in the*world as it is now. Every act 
leaves the world with a deeper or a fainter 
impress of God. He then passes into his next 
relation to the world with enlarged, or dimin- 
ished, presentation of ideal values. 

He is not the world, but the valuation of 
the world. In abstraction from the course of 
events, this valuation is a necessary meta- 
physical function. Apart from it, there could 
be no definite determination of limitation 
required for attainment. But in the actual 
world, He confronts what is actual in it with 
what is possible for it. Thus He solves all 
indeterminations. 

The passage of time is the journey of the 
world towards the gathering of new ideas into 
actual fact. This adventure is upwards and 
downwards. Whatever ceases to ascend, fails 

[159] 


RELIGION IN THE MAKING 


to preserve itself and enters upon its inevitable 
path of decay. It decays by transmitting its 
nature to slighter occasions of actuality, by 
reason of the failure of the new forms to 
fertilize the perceptive achievements which 
constitute its past’ history. The universe 
shows us two aspects: on one side it is phys- 
ically wasting, on the other side it is spirit- 
ually ascending. 

It is thus passing with a slowness, incon- 
ceivable in our measures of time, to new 
creative conditions, amid which the physical 
world, as we at present know it, will be 
represented by a ripple barely to be distin- 
guished from non-entity. 

The present type of order in the world 
has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it 
will find its grave in an unimaginable future. 
There remain the inexhaustible realm of ab- 
stract forms, and creativity, with its shifting 
character ever determined afresh by its own 
creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all 
forms of order depend. 

[160] 





. 


eer ae 


s 











4 
? 
apy 
} 
“a 
: 
m4 +> 


Hay 





